Once upon a time, HTML was the only language on the web. Styling was done with tables and color tags. Then CSS came along, and changed how we though about design. CSS selectors grew to let you target almost any element on your page in many many ways. Inline styles were shunned, to improve maintainability, and keeping you HTML free from junk.

A little down the road, we are told not to use the power of CSS selectors. We are now told to only use classes, and nothing else. And we’re now left to painfully go through our markup and styles and create a set of classnames that are unique but general.

At the same time CSS is still missing many features. In 2015, we can’t rely on CSS to have variables. Vjeux from the React time detailed these problems a few months ago in this talk.

Vjeux concludes that we should write our CSS in javascript for all the benefits that come from using a real...

A simple Gist by Substack, the author of Browserify has caused much drama in the javascript community. A lot has been said about modularity vs the kitchen-sink approach.

While on the one hand, Substack talks about how bundling features into a single project hurts Semver and hurts competition, Pete Hunt is sick of this ‘modularity shaming’ and points out that the Webpack codebase is extremely modular.

I see some good points on either side of the story, but I think the major difference between the two projects is something else entirely:

Compatibility with node.js

Browserify

Browserify was born to make your Node code in the browser. Till date it only supports the node flavour of commons (including JSON support) and provides in-built shims for many node core modules. Everything else is a different package. Need to watch files for incremental compilation? Use Watchify. Need Bundle...

There are the often simple explanations, Pure functions, no side effects, etc. All these sounds like huge limitations to most programmers who are used to using for loops etc. I’m going to talk about it in a different way.

Functional programming is different way to program. It’s not always a better, but it can often be more resilient to bugs. Also, it doesn’t just have limitations, but also it’s own set of features or powers. Let’s look into those:

First Class Functions

If you have a background in C/C++, this concept may seem a little foreign to you. (C++ has add function pointers now) But this perhaps one of the most powerful features that enables functional programming. First class functions means nothing other than the fact that functions are just another type of value that can be passed around, stored in variables, accepted as arguments in other functions and returned. Without...

The semi-colons in Javascript debate is probably decades old. (Which is quite a lot considering that the language itself is less that 2 decades old)
Most javascript developers are taught to always use semi-colons. The ASI in javascript is strange and inconsistent, and can surprise in weird ways.

So, let’s just not rely on stupid ASI and always write semi-colons. It sounds good enough. It sounds logical. Also, Douglas Crockford said it, so it’s probably the right thing to do.

But, the more time I spend writing semi-colons, the more I realize that you can’t really avoid the ASI by putting semi-colons. I agree that the JS ASI is weird and strange. But it is not inconsistent. It has a certain set of rules that work in every browser.

To use a saying made famous by Nokia, using semi-colons to avoid the ASI is like pissing in your pants to keep yourself warm. You see using semi-colons makes...

Grunge.js is what I can call my first major Open Source project. It launched without much fanfare. And it’s been stagnant ever since. It has seen little activity on Github, and almost no one has actually used it on a real project. Hell, even I’ve never actually used it on a project.

Grunge.js was my way to put generators to use and make something interesting. Turns out, Lazy.js does most of the things it does, and the few things that it does that other libraries don’t are edge-cases that people usually don’t care about.

Grunge.js, I thought, was going to turn into just a library for academic interest, but then I saw transducers and js-channels. At first, I didn’t really get it, but then I saw how amazing transducers could be.

They are fast, and extremely flexible. They make it possible to treat channels and observables as just another collection you can map over.

However amazing...

This year’s WWDC was a big surprise for anyone following Apple. But the biggest surprise was the new language called Swift. Apple has managed to create a whole new language that borrows heavily from many other languages but eventually is something unlike anything out there. The syntax may be similar but there unique characteristics to the language that are not out there in any other language. One of these is the fact that Swift is completely compatible with Objective-C. It uses the same APIs and in fact you can use both languages in the same project. It is then but natural for lots of people to directly compare Swift with Objective-C. Others have also compared Swift to Go, Scala, F, C etc.

I’m here to compare it to Javascript. Going over the language, I see the many similarities. And even in places where the languages are very different, there are ways where Swift can be written in a...

CSS is the language developers love to hate. This is mostly because of the inconsistent syntax. But many fail to recognize the power of modern CSS. I’m here to give an example of CSS power that may very well blow your mind. As an additional bonus, this technique can be used to provide a better first load experience for Angular apps and can be a fix for its SEO problems that are often hard to fix without some sort of server setup.

Ladies and gentlemen, introducing :target

:target is a special pseudo selector in CSS that helps you change the style of something that is currently the target — the hash address in the URL matches its id. It sounds harder than it is so let me jump straight into an example, but first, a little recap about the hash address in browsers.

Consider, a static website, say, an FAQ page. All the questions are at top, followed by all the answers. You want users who...

Eval is Evil. Douglas Crockford has made that so popular that any competent Javascript developer thinks twice before actually using eval. But when do we even need to use eval?

Sometime we need to actually affect the webpage by evaluating a string. Those are cases when there is no way around eval. However, in most cases, eval is usually used for testing, and providing an interactive coding experience in the browser for tutorials, demos and the like.

I recently ran into the problem while developing Imprezzive. Imprezzive is a modern web-based presentation framework that has been tailored especially for real-time editing and collaboration and sharing code samples.

One of the things I wanted to accomplish with Imprezzive was to provide a text editor within the slides where you could actually run the code and see the results. This is very useful for presenting code samples and showing...

I have long preferred Bash over Zsh for one simple reason. Speed. Zsh, with all its awesome features is just the tiniest amount slower than Bash. And with some good dotfiles, you can pimp out your bash to work great. I have used Paul Irish’s dotfiles for my Mac for the last couple of years.

Paul Irish has dotfiles that are tailor-made for a mac. Apart from the obvious goodies like syntax highlight, z jumps, and the obvious aliases, they also include script files to install common packages, and some seriously funny aliases, and useful little functions.

Two of my favourites:

• please : a much better alternative to using sudo
• c : a super awesome cat replacement with syntax highlighting

But one feature pushed me over the edge — autosuggestions. Here’s a demo:

If there is one thing faster than quick keyboard shortcuts, its not typing at all. Once I saw this, I had to have it. I...

Sublime Text is hands-down the most popular text editor among web developers. Arguably, it’s also the best. The Vim and Emacs aficionados will argue that once you master their editor of choice, your productivity goes through the roof compared to GUI text editors. I argue that while Vim and Emacs have steep learning curves and take weeks if not months or years to master, Sublime is easy to learn and you can get running within days. Moreover, with awesome plugins, endless and customizable keyboard shortcuts, you can get as productive, if not more as you would with vim and emacs. Not to start a flame war, but it’s true. (Yes, Sublime text supports the regex based find and replace etc.)

At any rate, there are definitely similarities between Sublime Text and other text editors. First and foremost, you need to set it up to make it awesome. Here are a set of steps to get there.

Step 1 -