I used to hate programming in JavaScript. I remember the days of debugging-by-alerts and strait up trying to guess problems that were occurring in situation where alerts weren’t useful. I always used to complain endlessly about JavaScript’s poor debugging mechanisms, its odd bugs in Internet Explorer, and its documentation, or rather lack thereof. I even remember the first time I learned what AJAX was. Jim pointed me to some tutorials and explained a thing or two, and my first AJAX feature showed up in Cellarspot. I pursued Cellarspot in a software engineering class, and I explicitly remember proudly showing the insanely basic feature off to the entire class, smiling all the while.

I suppose what I’m trying to get to is that I’ve taken a liking to JavaScript. I’m by no means an expert at it, but I’ve begun to thoroughly enjoy programming in it. Tools like Firebug have made JavaScript much more manageable, and for whatever reason I’ve been able to find better help docs online lately.

What was once an enemy has become a friend; now all I need to do is start writing object-oriented JavaScript and using libraries such as JQuery and Scriptaculous. I’m going to make a valiant effort to do so in my developing nations project, which we’re implementing with Ruby on Rails.