Elegantly Simple

JavaScript catches a lot of flack for it’s “ugliness,” but I’m rather fond of the language. It’s first-class functions make up for any quirks you have to deal with in the language. Consider this test case:

{% gist 1308316 output.js %}

It generates this output when run with --spec:

{% gist 1308316 output.txt %}

I’m using test cases like this throughout my upcoming Programming Node.js book to test output of some of the simple scripts.

Yes, I know you can get some amazingly expressive test cases in other languages, but I dare people who say that JavaScript is any ugly language to find fault with this bit of code.