Javascript and Kindergarten

Will Spock find true logic?
Will Sarek finally open that Waffle House he dreams of?
Will Amanda will the "Babes Of Vulcan" contest this year?

• Beats me what it is - When you're a kid, there's a lot of stuff that's a mystery to you. Funny-looking thing with metal pieces? Beats me. When you're looking through somebody else's JavaScript, you get the same feeling. Most programmers couldn't name a variable something like "TitleText". Nope, that would be too easy. So instead they give it a useful name like "g7". My first contract program on an Apple II used variables like "g9" because the language only supported two-letter variables. Nowadays we've got to cut the size of the download! So we're back to square one. Ever look through somebody else's JS code? You might as well drink a six-pack and try to figure out Vulcan soap operas. Got a variable "j3qx4"? Beats me. There's just too much going on under the surface for your brain to track effectively.
• Do little things at a time - When you were a kid, if the teacher asked you to do something like "pick up your toys, go to the bathroom, get your lunch, and stand in line" you'd just stand there with a dumb look on your face. Kids can only take so many instructions at one time. JS is the same way. If you're writing a 10-line JS function, life is good. If you're writing a 40 or 60-line JS function, you've got a bit of work. If you're writing an 800-line function, not only should you look up "coupling and cohesion" on Wiki, but you're on the Bataan Death March.I don't care how good your IDE is, do little things. You can still stand there with a dumb look on your face, just not while the other programmers are looking.
• Stay away from the bullies - In school, if the bully wanted the good seat in the cafeteria, you gave it to him. Likewise, if you're coding something that, say, Microsoft or Google is also coding, their solution wins. Yes, you can re-invent the wheel, but whatever they are doing will have so much market traction that it will become a sort of standard.
• Color inside the lines - When I was a kid, seems like every day we had some kind of art project. It was probably something to give the teachers a break. There would always be paper, crayons or paints, scissors, tape, and that smelly glue. I'm not sure what we ever did with all that stuff. For all I know the teachers had bought stock in a school supply company and were making a killing on options trading. But I did learn something important: people want something with just the right amount of flash. Flash and sizzle are great -- it's what makes a site distinctive. You always have to balance the sizzle with the content, however. When done well, your sliding DIVs, blinking SPANS, and fading IMG tags will just highlight the good content, not distract from it. So JS is all about little details, little splashes around the edges. Sure, there's the magic engine that does whatever neat thing your site does, like contact the ghost of Elvis or enter the reader on American Idol, but that's content. Content is always king. The trick is to also add the little details in the right spots to accent the content. And no, taping construction paper to your monitor does not count.
• Don't keep screwing around with it - On parent day, my parents came to the school to visit the teachers and see how I was doing. All the little art projects were put up on the walls, all the little desks were in a row. Each desk had a piece of masking tape with the child's name across the top. One art project was put up at an awful angle, and out of all of the desks, one desk had the tape all messed up, obviously where it had been pulled up and played with and stuck back down. If you do something so that it works, and it's tested, leave it alone, for goshsakes. There's nothing worse than taking a perfectly good piece of code and mucking it up because you wanting the indents to be different.
• Share - If you don't share in Kindergarten, they make you sit in the corner. In JavaScript, yes, you can set a timer for every 50ms and do whatever you like, but people are going to say ugly things about your family if you do. Sure, you can grab that windows onload function and just beat out anybody who wants a piece of it, but other stuff ain't going to work. JS is the language of the web, and that means your JS had better be playing nice with all the other JS on the page, some of which you didn't write. Eventually there may be an interop standard for side-by-side JS living on the same page from different vendors, but until there is, you have to just try to share as best you can. Just think of how much better you'll feel.

That's how to take your school experience and apply it to your web programming. If the languages keep evolving like this, maybe in another twenty years those hand-painting and taping skills might come in handy. I just hope they don't give us those little desks again.