JavaScript is a fine language in many ways — a fact that many people have noticed by now. But one of its biggest problems is the design of its standard library. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit to complain about; this note covers just Math.max.

Nearly a year ago, Mark Jason Dominus blogged about runN, a program he’d written. I’ve stol– uh, I mean, adapted his version for my own ends, with a couple of differences. This is a rationale for my changes.

Today I read an article by Zed Shaw about the strengths and weaknesses of Ruby, part of a series of similar articles about several dynamic languages, each written by an appropriate expert.

Most of it was just as you’d expect: a description of the Ruby landscape, and the places it works well. But buried here are there are one or two comments that just make no sense whatsoever.

Eric Sink has an interesting piece about MeWare, ThemWare, and UsWare. The basic idea is that one way of categorising software is by who uses it:

• MeWare: only the developer
• UsWare: the developer, among others
• ThemWare: people other than the developer

I think most programmers can see what Eric’s getting at there. If you’ve ever worked on, say, a piece of software used exclusively by people in a different department of the company you work for, you know how hard it can be to ensure that the software actually meets those people’s needs.

However, I took issue with one particular thing Eric says.

I’m hardly the first person to observe that it’s hard to test code that needs a database. Production usage almost certainly needs a database server, but then the tests need some way of getting a suitable database handle.

A colleague approached me today regarding a unit test he was writing. He was constructing a series of test cases from a data structure; his code at the time used a multi-line string of which each line had several fields which together described a test to run.

In the context of a discussion about the Y2.038K problem, Craig Berry surmised that the 32-bit Unix time_t type originated on 16-bit machines. That’s entirely true; for those with too much time on their hands, here’s a short history of Unix time handling.

I seem to have accidentally written a CPAN module, and by remote control at that.

There’s been some discussion on p5p about perhaps making the next stable version of Perl (version 5.12) automatically enable strictures (and maybe even warnings).

Here’s a MySQL query issued by some Perl code:

$db->do(q{
    CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE byline_age (
        byline_id int PRIMARY KEY,
        last_used int not null
    )
    SELECT byline_id, MAX(IfNull(published_at, ?)) AS last_used
    FROM article
    GROUP BY byline_id
}, undef, time());

Spot the bug? No, nor did I.

[Also published here.]

Mastering Regular Expressions has been around for a long time — this is the third edition of a book originally published a decade ago. Does that actually reflect justified popularity, or is it just that this is the only book-length treatment of the various regex engines, how they differ, and how to get the most out of them? I’m glad to say that doesn’t seem to be case: if you use regexes in any depth at all, you should probably read this book.