Random rant and not very on-topic. Feel free to hit Delete and move on. I've just spent a day coding in Javascript, and wishing browsers supported Python instead (or as well). All I needed to do was take two dates (as strings), figure out the difference in days, add that many days to both dates, and put the results back into DOM Input objects (form entry fields). Pretty simple, right? Javascript has a Date class, it should be fine. But no. First, the date object can't be outputted as a formatted string. The only way to output a date is "Feb 21 2011". So I have to get the three components (oh and the month is 0-11, not 1-12) and emit those. And Javascript doesn't have a simple format function that would force the numbers to come out with leading zeroes, so I don't bother with that.
What if I want to accept any delimiter in the date - slash, hyphen, or dot? Can I just do a simple translate, turn all slashes and dots into hyphens? Nope. Have to go regular expression if you want to change more than the first instance of something. There's no nice string parse function (like sscanf with "%d-%d-%d"), so I hope every browser out there has a fast regex engine. When all you have is a half-ton sledgehammer, everything looks like a really REALLY flat nail... Plus, Javascript debugging is annoyingly difficult if you don't have tools handy. I need third-party tools to do anything other than code blind? Thanks. Oh, and "int i" is illegal in Javascript. Whoops. That one is my fault, though. Javascript's greatest strength is that it exists in everyone's browser. That is simultaneously it's worst failing, because it becomes nigh impossible to improve it. If Chrome's V8 starts supporting new features and everyone else's JS engines don't, we can't use those features. Even if they're added to the standard, there'll still be old browsers that don't support things. The only way to add to the language is to dump stuff into a .js file and include it everywhere. But if anyone feels like writing an incompatible browser, please can you add Python scripting? Chris Angelico -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
