JavaScript: A newbie’s thoughts

I wanted to record an impression from earlier this year when I needed to use a little JavaScript in some web UI we were doing.  After reading Douglas Crockford’s JavaScript: The Good Parts, I had two thoughts:

I am surprised and impressed how tiny JavaScript is compared to Java.

and

Whoa!  This is not Java!

The language itself is just tiny.  It amazed me that you can do so much with something so itty-bitty!

Did you know you could do this?

Did you know you can execute Javascript from the address bar in your browser?

javascript:alert("hi y'all!")

Or perhaps more usefully,

javascript:alert(navigator.userAgent)

(This works in both Firefox and Internet Explorer.)

I didn’t realize that the address bar was actually a command line!

Thanks to this MSDN article for the idea!