[JasonFruit]

If the "Closing Thoughts" express the point of his amusing and mostly well-executed exercise, then for all his skill it's a wasted effort. It's precisely "doctrine and dogma", "rulebooks and boilerplate", that make JavaScript work for group development and long-term maintainability.

This is the coding equivalent of the garage musician who says, "Don't bother me with rules — I'm playing pure emotion here, man!"

[freehunter]

I love coding with emotion. As someone who is not a professional developer, I write mainly scripts or small, single purpose programs. Most are command line, some others only have the most basic GUI that would make everyone at HN cringe. This is fine for me. Reading my code, many times you can tell what mood I was in while writing it.

Unfortunately, finding new languages that allow me to write how I feel is sometimes difficult because no one talks about raw emotion in code, or single-developer and one-off projects. I love Lua for this.

[dyeje]

Who says everything has to be suitable for group development or long term maintainability? What's wrong with just coding for the sake of expressing oneself? I love these kind of things precisely because of this. Programming is an art, and I feel we need to be reminded of that every now and again. You don't always write a song or picture to maximize their appeal to others, sometimes you just have something in you that needs to get out.

[JasonFruit]

"Fat" says that rules are "the enemies of good JavaScript." That is what I'm arguing against, not occasionally writing something a given way just because that's how you like to code.

[anonymous]

It worked for the Beatles.

[JasonFruit]

They also had (in addition to abnormal amounts of talent) a producer who not only knew the rules but had the knack of knowing how much could be applied without squashing their music.