It currently has a loose target of ES5. It has some features like Object.create, but not others like property descriptors or Function.prototype.bind.
One of my hopes for this post is to encourage interest in Higgs, and ideally contributions. One aspect of that would be feedback that would help in evaluating and prioritizing what missing features to implement.
There are directors who have scored one or many of their own films, such as John Carpenter, Robert Rodriguez, and Clint Eastwood. It's true that excepting the ones who have a strong music background director-composers usually produce somewhat simpler and critically not-acclaimed scores but they also often end up working well. Look at the Halloween theme; it's a very simple melody but it somehow captured the mood of the film and people's imaginations.
I agree with your general point though, a collaboration between the "user" and "expert" will generally produce something superior; but sometimes there can even be a little bit of a liability having the other party around.
The school teacher thing is a poor example though - that's just marketing trying to make an appeal to authority. Something like if a teacher had designed a desk or chair would be better because their job gives them insight into that as opposed to say, a mail carrier.
To be fair this guy is probably not as far out there as you might think. Consider for one that quite a lot of people believe in transubstantiation; a bit of bread and wine becomes the body of their savior. I don't think this is too far from that, this doll becomes in some way a real companion for him.
Likewise, his little invented back-stories for his dolls are not so materially different than say my relationship with my girlfriend. I don't and can't truly know my girlfriends existence; everything I know about her is basically a story I tell myself based on the things she says to me and what I assume or surmise myself. If it turned out one of these days that she had been completely and totally dishonest with me about who she was - everything I thought I knew about her was not true - in a lot of ways our relationship would have been just as much a fantasy as Davecats.
I'm not prepared to go in for it myself, or even consider it totally healthy and desirable...but he seems to have a good handle on it and I wouldn't be too quick to judge him. Maybe he is a little nuts, but so are most people I have met.
Sure, it would be a poor name for a new soda you plan to market in Russian-speaking countries; but probably not really worth mentioning here. I'm sure you realize, but lots of Russian words/phrases sound funny (or obscene) in English too - this is true of every language and vice versa. Naming things is hard enough already without trying to cover what it might sound like in every major language.
>Naming things is hard enough already without trying to cover what it might sound like in every major language.
IMO, when you give a name to internationally used thing, this should be taken care of. I.e. name shouldn't sound funny obscene in any of the major languages.
I think most Russian-speaking programmers are intelligent enough to understand it's a foreign name, especially since it's written as "kal" and not "кал".
> I.e. name shouldn't sound funny obscene in any of the major languages.
My point is that this is probably more difficult than you realize.
It's also pointless; if you're the maker of a consumer product (like a soda) and you expect to market it in Russian-speaking countries, then of course you need to watch out for such things. Something like this which is only incidentally used by a small portion of technically literate Russian speakers - it's not really worth bothering with.
JS supports integers; it just doesn't have an integer type so you can't always store, operate, etc on them efficiently (though a smart engine can do some of that for you). It has bitwise manipulation operations which treat the Number as a 32 bit int. There are also Typed Arrays which make it easier to work on raw binary data. Though yes, it can occasionally get a little finicky trying to interface a high level dynamic language with lower level stuff.
Anyway, for this I'm sure there will be a lot of libraries that handle that for you and expose a fairly high level api; like the blinking led in the example.
One of my hopes for this post is to encourage interest in Higgs, and ideally contributions. One aspect of that would be feedback that would help in evaluating and prioritizing what missing features to implement.