Infrequently Noted

Just back from a long weekend, a couple of things struck me this morning that are evident but not perhaps obvious. Reality always has multiple sides, so in true Jenny Holzer style, please accept (but not entirely) these small web-development truisms:

• Plugins are not evil.
• The web is a force for social change.
• The internet centralizes power...slowly...oh so slowly...
• CSS is the problem. Also, the solution.
• Competition does not mean that your favorite player wins.
• JavaScript cannot save you. Even if it could, you should not let it, for the price of this short-term salvation is the end of what you like about the web.
• Fast is better than slow. Slow is better than closed.
• A web that isn't extensible will wither and die.
• Proprietary can be incredibly fast.
• The sooner we take HTML out of the hands of C++ hackers, the sooner we'll screw it up.
• Extensibility is a crutch.
• Plugins bring the advantages of slow development, unportable code, hard failure, and security holes to a platform designed to remove them. In other words, they're totally evil. Also, they make the web awesome.
• Getting what you want will not make you happy. It is your inner dissonance that brought you to the web in the first place. You might as well own it.
• "Proprietary" is the loser's word for "I'm too lazy to copy the good parts".
• Small firms are always more nimble and therefore better.
• You can't beat big companies in the end.
• HTML 5 is a cruel joke -- I can't wait for it to be done.

JavaScript is crying out for a way to write functions more tersely. I've added my suggestion to the debate, and was vaguely aware that Mozilla had implemented "function expressions". It wasn't until I saw their use in the (excellent) ProtoVis examples that I realized how stomach-churningly bad the syntax for them is. Instead of dropping the word function from the declaration of lambdas, they kill the { } charachters, leaving the big visual turd at the front of the lambda while simultaneously omitting the symmetrical visual aid that allows programmers to more easily spot missing terminators.

Oof.

It'd be one thing of the feature saved enough effort (typing) to justify the confusion, but it doesn't. Bitter syntactic sugar in a language that's already complicated by whitespace issues should be avoided.