Chapter 7. JavaScript and Danger-Driven Development
"In JavaScript, there is a beautiful, elegant, highly expressive language that is buried under a steaming pile of good intentions and blunders." – Douglas Crockford, JavaScript: The Good Parts
This quotation expresses essentially what optimizing JavaScript code is all about.
Often fascinated by the latest shiny feature or by the need to deliberately or pretentiously display his own abilities, the developer's mind sometimes slips into a mysterious state of awaken sleep by which he is overcome by the need to show off overly complex code or by the desire to use the most recent features even though he knows, deep down, that this means that he will have to sacrifice long-term stability and the efficiency of his computer program. This way of building applications is what we might call "Danger-Driven Development". JavaScript has many very bad parts but has enough good parts to outweigh the bad...