Refactoring JavaScript

Chapter 2. Which JavaScript Are You Using?

This might seem like it has an easy answer. How varied can one language be? Well, in JavaScript’s case, any of these can greatly impact your tooling and workflows:

• Versions and specifications
• Platforms and implementations
• Precompiled languages
• Frameworks
• Libraries
• What JavaScript do you need?
• What JavaScript are we using?

These can represent not only different ways of doing things, but also a significant time investment to decide upon, learn to proficiency, and eventually write fluently. Throughout this chapter, we will explore these complexities in order to uncover what JavaScript we can write, and throughout the rest of the book, we’ll get more specific about what JavaScript we should write.

Some of the choices involved in what JavaScript to use will be imposed by the project, some by the framework, and some by your own personal tastes.

Developing coding style is one of the biggest challenges in any language. Because of the complexity and diversity of the JavaScript ecosystem, this can be especially challenging in JavaScript. To become a well-rounded coder, some people recommend learning a new programming language every year. But with JavaScript, you might not even be able to learn every dialect in your whole lifetime. For a lot of languages “learning the language” means being competent with core APIs, resources, and one or two popular extensions/libraries. Applying that same standard to JavaScript leaves many contexts unexplored. ...