<story><title>You must learn JavaScript </title><url>http://thenerdary.net/articles/entry/you_must_learn_javascript</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>aplusbi</author><text>JavaScript isn&apos;t really important for non-web development.  I used to program video games for hand held consoles and JavaScript was the last thing on my mind.&lt;p&gt;Okay, maybe I was working for the unmentioned 1% (and for what it&apos;s worth, the company I currently work for uses JavaScript).  And really, it&apos;s not a bad idea to learn JavaScript - it&apos;s pretty ubiquitous and chances are you will work for a company that uses it at some point in your career.  But honestly, I&apos;m getting a little sick of all these articles that seem to forget that there is more to programming than web apps.&lt;p&gt;Edited to remove snarkiness.</text></comment>
<story><title>You must learn JavaScript </title><url>http://thenerdary.net/articles/entry/you_must_learn_javascript</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>reduxredacted</author><text>I &lt;i&gt;very reluctantly&lt;/i&gt; conceded this point a few years ago, but in a slightly different way.  I&apos;ve been doing JavaScript-as-a-kludge-for-whatever-server-side-framework-I-happen-to-discover-the-limitations-of for a while.  I&apos;m discovering that the complexity of every browser&apos;s quirks means I&apos;m going to have to do more than just &quot;learn it&quot;.  And therein lies the problem.&lt;p&gt;JavaScript isn&apos;t an awful language (all languages have their pluses and minuses and developers are so touchy on this subject, I don&apos;t even want to broach it).  It&apos;s the sheer number of platforms (browser/hardware/OS combinations) that make JavaScript painful to learn properly.  Every browser on every device must perform adequately.  It&apos;s not a matter of supporting Windows or MacOS, it&apos;s every variant of RIM device, i* device, every browser on Windows Mobile taking into account the performance/memory footprint (to a lesser extent anymore), and devices with browser variants running on Android.&lt;p&gt;For the sake of my current set of projects -- requiring reasonable compatibility across platforms, but not a universally good user experience on all, learning jQuery became a necessity.  Though I&apos;d prefer to not be framework dependent, I&apos;ve found that understanding how to use jQuery has also improved my understanding of the various quirky implementations of JavaScript in general.&lt;p&gt;I have no doubt that future projects will require a good user experience on most platforms.  Does anyone have any suggestions regarding good, comprehensive resources in this area?  The blog post mentions several online resources for folks wishing to learn/understand the language (some of which I haven&apos;t used before), but I&apos;m wondering if there are particularly excellent tools beyond that (IDEs, good debuggers beyond Firebug) or anything else out there that can assist in identifying code that &lt;i&gt;won&apos;t work&lt;/i&gt;, or &lt;i&gt;won&apos;t work well&lt;/i&gt; in cross platform scenarios (for free or not).</text></comment>