Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

I admit, scope can be a tough concept to get your head around, especially when different programs do it differently, and JavaScript is no exception. In fact, JavaScript makes quite a few design decisions which, while logical, can go unnoticed even by programmers with a fair amount of experience in the language. This blog post is not the place to list and explain all of them, but I will try to give some insight into the global variable issue, and how persistence of variables works. Hopefully this knowledge can be useful to people making web pages which involve storing a lot of state, like JavaScript games require.

That’s not a very helpful (or fair) title, but it’s what I’ve called a little file on my computer containing some helpful reminders about how unintuitive programming in Perl is. My incompatibility with Perl may well be to do with my personal preference, or inexperience with it, but compared to the half dozen programming languages I feel I know well, Perl seems to be deliberately difficult with no obvious benefit. Most of my observations below focus on Perl’s idea of scope, as the confusing rules it uses can, I’ve found, be grouped together to tell a story of misdirection and contradiction. If I was writing a post about all the things I dislike about the language, it would take me more than a month to complete, but just so you know, it would start with the fact that Perl doesn’t have Boolean data types or a switch statement, unlike every other decent language in the world.