Thread:Pecoes/@comment-4674838-20120427024735/@comment-3508190-20120427041430

I like Chrome, but I'm a Firefox user. The Firefox tool of choice is Firebug. Chrome's console was inspired by Firebug, but there seem to be a few subtle differences. It doesn't seem to be possible e.g. to enter anything more than one-liners in Chrome. In Firebug, you have an expand-button to the right that opens an edit panel where you can add (and test) scripts of arbitrary length. That should save you a lot of edits to your wikia.js. You'll find lots of documentation about Firebug on its wiki. I suppose there's enough good Chrome console documentation as well, but I wouldn't know...

As for JavaScript as a language: I've tinkered with quite a few, but the two languages I have some decent experience in are Perl and PHP. Both are untyped. It's got its advantages. Seriously. Not just that your code is shorter. It saves you from the hell of polymorphism. *shudder* From my own experience I can tell you that the occasions where type does matter are few and far in between. That's doubly true for JavaScript where user input comes only in the form of mouse actions and text inputs - which always resolve to strings.

Oh, and just because traditional OOP doesn't work particulaly well in JavaScript, doesn't speak against it in my book. Firstly because JavaScript is probably best viewed as a functional language and not as an OOP language anyway. But secondly I think the usefulness of OOP depends on the size of your codebase. Anything below a few thousand lines works fine without classes. JavaScript code is more often than not shorter.

There are nice JavaScript IDEs as well btw. If you have a Java background, you're probably an Eclipse user... Then try JSDT (or PDT or Zend Studio)! My personal preference is Komodo, but that's just me.