[Rails-spinoffs] Re: Need help to learn Prototype Programming

[Colin Mollenhour]

I couldn't help but laugh when I read your comparison of writing _javascript_ to Assembly!  The fact of the matter is, there is a lot of functionality out there that you can't obtain without getting down and dirty with _javascript_, and libraries like Prototype are there to make it easy and cross-browser compatible. There isn't a nice abstracted way to do everything I want so I'd just end up writing the _javascript_ anyway, and my hand-written _javascript_ is going to be a lot better than hacking up abstracted wrappers that I don't really understand what's happening.  If you are going to do any *serious* Ajax work you are going to need to know _javascript_, unless you limit yourself to whatever frameworks out there provide to you, which currently isn't much. Colin Phlip wrote: Toby Parent wrote: I find myself agreeing. If one depends on the framework to generate one's _javascript_, one doesn't learn _javascript_, which is sort of the point of this question. I'm using Prototype in CakePHP, but I like the fact that, while options are available to front-end my _javascript_, I can simply learn the stuff. Once we "learn _javascript_", then we need to write it as flexibly and platform-neutraly as possible. I would rather bottle all the cross-platform stuff up and call into it, than rewrite all the if(ie) stuff, all the time. That, in turn, requires obscenely complex object models in _javascript_. They deserve to be written once and called many times. This exact discussion was once held, 30 years ago, regarding Assembler and C. You had to know Assembler to code C, and you used C to avoid Assembler by any means necessary. C handled porting the machine code to other CPUs. Yet there were still people claiming that you should still write more Assembler, to learn it, to prove you can, when it's convenient, when you know what to write, etc. Sure those reasons still exist. But your default choice, in that situation, should always be C-first. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Spinoffs" group. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-spinoffs@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-spinoffs?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---