(I give great hugs)

Ok, I personally don't give great hugs but I do like a nice brace and I think I can match parens with the best of them. I wonder, though, are my fellow Javascript people OK? I remember PEMDAS just fine but I admit I fall down sometimes on how modulo relates to bitwise-or relates to logical-or (instead i default to parentheses in their multitudes). I'm reviewing some WebUSB SDR code in Javascript now and I see that even the cold hugs of the teletype are too much for some. Worse than parens that never were, I see people refactoring to eliminate parentheses which do no harm. In some cases they are removing pairs that are actually required, though optional in the sense that correctness is a nice-to-have.

Punctuated parentheses are not a burden passed down from generation to generation like some long tail call. These parentheses have been making math more intelligible since at least 1556. Without that invention, people would write nonsense like

actually, that's a perfectly legal piece of javascript. Click and see if you guessed right about the result! Several of the anchors (look for a little lambda subscript) in this post evaluate the text of the anchor when clicked and they are editable also. Click them, tinker with them, repeat and see what javascript does.

~~ skip this post if in no mood for my nonsense today ~~

Maybe E. E. Cummings has (had?) it right, which of us really cares about order of evaluation

since feeling is first / who pays any attention / to the syntax of things / will never wholly kiss you;

when syntax itself is selfish and fickle; click yourself and weep

tho' javascript incorporated operator typeof since the beginning or the 20th century anyway the conceit of the thing does not demand it

a language with dynamic types could (should?) implement typeof as a function ; the better to take the measure of the thing or at least the type of it

harsh syntax sweeps in past where macro should be where you would be were you to be in but what syntax gives it takes also (or takes and gives)

wholly to be a fool / while Spring is in the world

what fool says sizeof in c when sizeof() would do ; the same who do not say typeof() no doubt

my blood approves, / and kisses are a better fate / than wisdom / lady I swear by all flowers

what is the size of wisdom when a typeless language has typeof and shuns sizeof as if flowers had no size

Wirth and Wilde are both now gone and we may never truly know the cost of anything or the value of nothing (or the other way round)

or we will and can we object (or object)

Don't cry / – the best gesture of my brain is less than / your eyelids' flutter which says

lambda: the ultimate gesture of my brain but it falters

if i had the strength of an arrow i could (would) not yield but this is folly and it would be an arrow function expression only that can (must) not yield but does falter

when this is nonsense

we are for each other: then / laugh, leaning back in my arms / for life's not a paragraph

but syntax takes here also and then is gone only if remains with lonely else and this has no this of its own stuck on the point of that arrow

And death i think is no parenthesis

no parentheses is death or just leaning back on paragraphs of unpunctuated syntax or worse: inconsistent

and failing silently

but syntax gives one final time but only just at the end not here

where we should like to see it but squeeze (just a bit) and there is love's expression

though syntax leads nowhere javascript is flowers are everywhere ; everywhere is enough

--

This post inspired by "[since feeling is first]", E. E. Cummings, Princess Scorpia from the 2018 She-Ra reboot "She-Ra and the Princesses of Power" (who does give great hugs), and the several fellow vanilla javascript programmers who I need to believe are still out there somewhere.