Thread:Pecoes/@comment-4674838-20120427024735

I was following your other conversation with Kangaroopower (starting a new post because I didn't want to interrupt your conversation about find & replace) and I was wondering what console exactly was being referred to how to activate code through it. Are you talking about a console built into a web browser (in my case, Chrome)? Is there a tutorial or something for how it works? Because I'm now familiar with right-clicking on a webpage and choosing "Inspect element" so that I can view the HTML, CSS rules and scripts for that webpage, and I was thinking that might be what you're were talking about? Because right now I'm trying to learn Javascript and basically what I'm doing is making hundreds of edits to my wikia.js on a testing wiki -- which is probably horribly inefficient.

Sort of on a separate note, I wanted to point out how difficult it is to learn Javascript if you're not a web developer. My programming experience began in Visual Basic -> Java (a common route in university), although my major area of study is math, not computer science. Anyways, the point I wanted to make is that my introduction to programming was OOP -- and when I started C I learned that branching away from that is very difficult (I'm now happy to be in C++, where things are OOP -- though there are some messy things like multiple inheritance). And then you have a language like Javascript which is just awful. It's not object oriented. Variables don't have types (which still makes no sense to me). It's not an "isolated" language in the sense that you can learn it standalone -- you also have to know some HTML. And then, in an environment like this, you also have to know a few peculiarities about the MediaWiki software (i.e. where to put the javascript, the fact that many HTML tags aren't supported, have to be able to discern what's wiki markup, what's HTML, what's CSS and what's Javascript when they're all being used together).

The reason most people don't know JS and they just copy code from the forums or whatever is probably because, if you're not computer savvy, you haven't a chance to begin with. And even if you are -- there's still a massive gap between web development and programming done in an IDE to develop applications. 