I actually don’t hate JavaScript.  I’m typically not a fan of duck-typed languages, and JavaScript has caused me no small number of headaches, but it has its uses, and it beats the alternative.  I could be writing in VBScript, after all…

Still, there are a few things about JavaScript that really, really tick me off.  One of those just bit me badly this morning.  Take a look at the following block of code:

   1: //Recursively sets the nodes and their children to the

   2: //specified checked state.

   3: function UpdateChildren(nodes, checked)

   4: {

   5:     for (i=0; i < nodes.get_count(); i++)

   6:     {

   7:         var node = nodes.getNode(i);

   8:         

   9:         node.set_checked(checked);

  10:         

  11:         if (node.get_nodes().get_count() > 0)

  12:             UpdateChildren(node.get_nodes(), checked);

  13:     }

  14: }

See anything wrong with that?  Seriously, stop and look at it before continuing any further.  I stared at that code for about an hour before I finally figured out what was wrong. 

The code looks pretty innocuous.  It’s a recursive method that walks a tree, basic stuff.  The problem though, is that the recursion was never ending.  It became stuck in a cycle where it was repeating the same recursive calls over and over, and I couldn’t figure out why.  It looked like the recursion was "leaking" somehow.  Turns out, that’s actually what was happening, but it wasn’t JavaScript’s fault.  I left the ‘var’ keyword out of the ‘i=0’ assignment.  That means that ‘i’ is created a global variable instead of a local variable!

I would *much* prefer that JavaScript have given me an error when I tried to assign a value to ‘i’ than just saying "meh, I’m sure you meant that to global."  Whoever thought that was a good idea obviously hates humanity and wanted to spread agony and sadness.  <sighs>, oh well, back to work.

NOTE: there won’t be an installment of "how to run a software company (into the ground) this week because I am running way behind.  Sorry!