JS (and) Crafting #11 – Grace Hopper, FinalizationRegistry, escape() and unescape(), CSS Nesting

This is JS (and) Crafting #11 - December 11th, 2023. Every Monday you will receive a hand-selected collection of links about JavaScript and how to craft better software.

JavaScript

Callback when a Value gets Garbage-Collected
FinalizationRegistry provides a way to request that a cleanup callback get called at some point when a value registered with the registry has been reclaimed (garbage-collected). (Cleanup callbacks are sometimes called finalizers.) This was introduced in ES2021 (ES12) in June 2021.

Global Functions escape() and unescape() Were Deprecated in ES3
escape() and unescape() were removed in ES3 (1999) and are not part of the ECMAScript standard anymore, instead use any of the functions encodeURI(), encodeURIComponent(), decodeURI(), decodeURIComponent().

Crafting

Grace Hopper
Grace Hopper was a computer scientist and US Navy rear admiral. She was a pioneer of computer programming who invented one of the first linkers. She popularized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today.

She believed that programming should be simplified with an English-based computer programming language. Her compiler converted English terms into machine code understood by computers.

CSS Nesting
Finally I can write CSS (almost) as I always did, with nesting. I used to write CSS like this:

p {}
  p a {}

With nesting I can write it like this:

p {
  a {}
}

I love it.

Also Have a Look at

jskatas.org - Learn JavaScript – Test-Driven.
"JavaScript the Language" Meetup - A team-coding, no-presentations meetup.
The #jslang Repo - Tests and learnings from 55+ #jslang meetups.

Feedback?

I'm eager to hear your thoughts, input, corrections or interesting links. Please get in touch via mastodon provide a pull request or email me.

Happy Crafting!

Wolfram