Comments on: Douglas Crockford’s Elements of JavaScript Style

By: Nathan Derksen

Nathan Derksen — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 17:44:37 +0000

A JS coding priniciple I strongly endorse – make variable and function names meaningful. It takes more space, but man does it make it easier to follow code. Taking a look through Douglas Crawford’s examples was painful with the one and two letter variable names. If you are really interested in compact code, start big and run a compactor later.

By: Philip Tellis

Philip Tellis — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 21:13:50 +0000

If you’re interested in the fortune cookie file to use in your email signatures, it’s here: http://bluesmoon.info/tech/javascript-style.tar.bz2

There’s also the elements of programming style done many years ago: http://db.ilug-bom.org.in/lug-authors/philip/misc/fortune-mod-prog-style.tar.gz

By: emehrkay

emehrkay — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 21:50:09 +0000

Nate, it would help if you would identify which ones seem arbitary. Shit, I might even be able to explain why some of these things are “rules.”

By: Nate Grover

Nate Grover — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 20:23:02 +0000

I would sure like to see some of his explanations as to “why”. Assertions are interesting but explanations are better. Some of these seem to be arbitrary.

By: emehrkay

emehrkay — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 19:32:59 +0000

Mark thanks for the heads up and thanks for the dojo guidelines. They are great and i’m sure you could follow them in other languages as well

By: Mark Holton

Mark Holton — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 18:15:57 +0000

@emehrkay: from my readings, in addition to Dean Edwards, I’d say other Crockford-like postings come from people like John Resig and Alex Russell Obviously there are other ‘titans’ of JS (Brendan Eich, Sam Stephenson, Joe Hewitt, etc), but John and Alex address more coding specific items and they are very active in posting on their blogs, and John is often posting about coding specifics in JS. Often times it relates to John’s library, jQuery, but also delves into other fundamental items with JS. http://ejohn.org/blog/ || http://alex.dojotoolkit.org/ …my two cents

By: Mark Holton

Mark Holton — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 18:06:13 +0000

Great post! Yes these have been around, but well worth reiterating and emphasizing. I like the Dojo style guide as well.. also reference the Mozilla JavaScript 1.5 guide: (http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Core_JavaScript_1.5_Guide).

By: Frank Thuerigen

Frank Thuerigen — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 17:32:29 +0000

@Kris:
though I know it is disputable, I totally agree. IÂ´d say all core JS objects are taboo anyway…

By: Kris Zyp

Kris Zyp — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 16:04:48 +0000

Here is another one I would add to the list:
Frameworks/libraries shouldn’t add new properties to Object.prototype or Array.prototype. This forces developers that use for in loops to have to check each property with hasOwnProperty. Some may say this is a good practice, but something forces developers to use a basic construct of the language in a different way should not be thrust upon developers. And json.js breaks this principal…

By: Tom Trenka

Tom Trenka — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 15:12:32 +0000

Oh, and thanks for the vote of confidence on the Dojo Style Guide :)

By: Tom Trenka

Tom Trenka — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 15:12:09 +0000

Just as a head’s up, Doug wrote these in 2005–they are not new at all.

By: Dean Edwards

Dean Edwards — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 14:57:31 +0000

+1 for the Dojo style guide. It is the closest thing we have to an “official” JS style guide.

By: Ben Bodien

Ben Bodien — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 14:25:53 +0000

A great list! As an imperative, compiled language coder still quite new to javascript, this is extremely useful.

By: Frank Thuerigen

Frank Thuerigen — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 14:05:57 +0000

100 % fit… not one thing I would question, and I use all of it without even thinking about it everyday. This would be my top ten hint list also.
Maybe I would add proper singleton and class code (especially private/public, closures) and namespaces to it. But thats it.

By: Jesse Kuhnert

Jesse Kuhnert — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 13:27:37 +0000

@emehrkay
Don’t know if anyone is the leading authority on style in any language but the Dojo style guide helped clear up a lot of questions for me a long time ago.

http://dojotoolkit.org/developer/StyleGuide

By: emehrkay

emehrkay — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 13:24:37 +0000

Is Crockford the leading authority on JS? He seems to be one of the people who care most about it and coming up with standardized usage, compatibility, etc.

Aside from Dean Edwards, who else is putting out JS stuff like this?

By: Jesse Kuhnert

Jesse Kuhnert — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 13:06:38 +0000

Nice. If more people had a better reference for writing well styled javascript code it might help eliminate some of the perceptions that js isn’t a real language.