Massimiliano Mantione – jsDay 2014 / The international Javascript Conference Tue, 13 May 2014 21:24:59 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.2 Javascript, metaprogramming, and you /talk/javascript-metaprogramming-and-you/ Wed, 23 Apr 2014 20:11:17 +0000 /?post_type=talk&p=333 We all know that Javascript is powerful but it can be a really terrible language when misused. Moreover, it lacks several advanced features that are taken for
granted in other languages.

One technique that is always overlooked is metaprogramming: hystorically only lisp dialects support it properly, and programmers regularly underestimate its power.

In the spirit of Coffeescript, Typescript, Clojurescript and other similar projects I have developed Metascript, which is designed to provide everything those languages offer, and then some, with a strong emphasis on metaprogramming.

We’ll have a quick tour of the language and see how it solves a lot of the problems that we need to deal with every day when writing code.

]]> Monads, Promises, and Reactive Metaprogramming /talk/monads-promises-and-reactive-metaprogramming/ Wed, 26 Mar 2014 08:56:07 +0000 /?post_type=talk&p=304 Prerequisites: having followed Federico Galassi’s or Sergi Mansilla’s talk (either is fine), or just having an idea on what rx.js does.

Javascript programmers are often struggling with asynchronous control flows. It does not matter if the sources of time warping are AJAX requests, the nodejs event loop, or a simple flow of events from the DOM: the result regularly converges to callback hell.

There are a lot of libraries and frameworks that try to address this problem now. If we don’t like them (and have time to waste) we can always wait for the ECMA committee and the browser vendors to do their job, adding proper async support to the language in the future.

We will see how monadic sequencing is at the root of most of those frameworks, and how a language with a programmable syntax can make your code cleaner now, without waiting for ES6 generators or ES7 async functions.

]]>