So, for a long time, I have always had a dislike for JavaScript. This has changed over time, but not for the reason you would expect. I'll get to why I enjoy it, but before that, I need to give some background:
It always made me sad that the early days of the web got a scripting language before it got a virtual machine. Since the web got a scripting language as the primary control structure of the client, everything effectively got throttled to the speed of the language's interpreter. Don't get me wrong, V8 has had impressive performance growth over the past decade, but there will always be a fundamental performance gap since we skipped an entire abstraction layer. Even with new emerging web standards like WASM, there is still significant performance issues. WASM does have direct DOM access and requires JS to act as a middleman between the DOM and its virtual machine. This has made the amount of code that is required to be shipped to the client substantially more than it really should be. And even if WASM could ship as an independent binary with no JS bindings, there would still be the issue of remaining compatible with older browsers. The only way that you can even attempt to do this is by shipping an entire JS based WASM interpreter that is a fallback if the client lacks WASM compatibility. All of these problems could have been avoided if the web had just started with a virtual machine as the initial standard.
Now I would like to caveat the last paragraph with one thing. I think the web has greatly benefited by having a standardized and "readable" language as its primary form of control. I think this lead to a more "open" and uniform web in the beginning. It might not be a semantic web, but at least its not like every webpage is running their own rendering engine in every language imaginable; a VM based web could have definitely lead to that outcome. - Oh wait, what's a framework again and why are there so many? - I'm sure you can see the similarities, its just a abstraction layer higher.
I still prefer compiled languages over scripting languages. But one day I was writing a really crappy interpreter for an esolang that I came up with a while ago. This is fizzbuzz for the weirdos that want to see its syntax:
!"Hello, world!";
a = 100;
$a{
a = a - 1;
d = a;
b = a % 3;
b = b == 0;
?b{
d = "fizz";
}
b = a % 5;
b = b == 0;
?b{
d = "buzz";
}
b = a % 5;
b = b == 0;
c = a % 3;
c = c == 0;
b = c & b;
?b{
d = "fizzbuzz";
}
d = "" + d + "\n";
!d;
}
This was one of the first interpreters that I had written that had dynamic typing. I came up with a set of arbitrary rules, many that make no sense, just so that it was impossible for an error to occur when using any operator on mismatched operands. What made this an esolang even better was that even if there was an error, it would arbitrarily replace the code using semantic analysis until the program is able to run. This made debugging this language very difficult. So what does this have to do with JavaScript? Well after I came up with all the arbitrary rules, I realized that most of them matched JavaScript's standard. Ever since that day, I have started calling JavaScript an esolang. Think about how funny that is, the modern informational monolith that we call the internet is primarily coded in a language that is basically an esolang. Once you realize that, it becomes much easier to cope with writing some of the monstrosities I've had to in the past.
LGTM; its an esolang anyways! Ship it to PROD, everything is just fine!
Ok, I know that was a long backstory. I couldn't help myself. On to the actual good stuff.
The other day I learned that JavaScript accepts UTF-8 characters in its strings without the need for an escape, within reason of course. Furthermore, a webpage can too, so long as you declare to the browser what encoding you are using. That got me thinking:
Isn't there a UTF-8 whitespace character with zero width?
Then immediately I started to think:
What if there are two different UTF-8 whitespace characters with zero width????????
Those two question made me lose sleep until around 2am I said screw it. I got up to go read about UTF-8 characters and what are legal character's in the ecmascript standard. I mean, that is what any normal person would do, right?