The Theo Spears Blog

I'm spending the day working on a visitor tracking and data recording system based around CouchDB, nodejs, and browser javascript. To my surprise I am broadly liking nodejs so far. The available libraries seem well build and easily composable, and not having to switch languages between client side and server side is very nice.

Clientside javascript is a different matter. I can never get used to just how little functionality is provided in the javascript standard library. Coupled with the way javascript files cannot easily depend on other javascript files, it makes development a real pain. Plus because this code all has to be transmitted over the wire it's much harder just to build on work which other people have already done. I'm shipping as part of my file some functions to get and set cookies. Why do I have to include this in my file rather than having some nice import statement? Why does this code have to be written at all rather than being part of the browser? Clientside javascript makes me annoyed.