I am back, stronger than ever!
This time, not with SML (who needs that anyway ... I stopped going to the lectures when they tried to teach me grammar. Me is not interested in grammar), but with JavaScript!
introduced me to "Codecademy", which offers an extensive course for this language, in the Pro version. Lucky for me, the Pro version is free for 7 days (at least as of right now).
How extensive you ask? Well, after 3 hours of consistent coding, this is my progress:
There might be some more material waiting for me.
What did I code so far? Only super serious stuff, of course. How to calculate my age in dog years for example!
Or, you know, telling people what my favorite animal is!
Something that threw me off slightly, was that you can apparently use recursive (recursive looking?) statements, and it works without crashing everything:
fahrenheit = Math.floor(fahrenheit)
is not something I would do in SML. Although I must confess, it's been a while since I worked with that language, maybe it'd work? My gut feeling says "no".
After I had already tempered with tamparatures tampered with temperatures, it was time to write something about the seasons that will expect me if when I move to Ireland: 404 - Summer not found.
The greatest thing about this tutorial? It allows you to insult non-existent people for their lack of success:
And last but not least, I wrote a short program that can tell the future. And as you all know, Magic Eight Balls do not lie, this certainly proves that Steem will moon this year!
So, what's my assessment so far?
JavaScript itself seems to be an easy to understand language, what I've seen so far is intuitive even for a biologist. Yes, having basic knowledge in SML might have helped, although it also led to 10 minutes of debugging, because I didn't realize that, while SML uses if - then - else, JavaScript uses if - else.
I like the fact that you can use ? : instead of if - else.
let dessert = "pudding";
if (dessert) {
console.log("HELL YEAH!")
}
else {
console.log("Awww :( ")
};
is just so much more to write than
dessert ?
console.log("HELL YEAH!")
:
console.log("Awww :( ");
On top of that, the tutorial offered by Codecademy is really nice. Depending on how fast I get through, I might actually pay money for the Pro version.