Weekly check-in 7/26

[horrorcheck]

I posted my weekly checkin to the TLC mailing list last night, but it was mostly whiny complaining about how I didn't get anything done, so I'm not going to repeat that here.

Instead I just want to talk about something in JavaScript that confuses me. (Maybe just because I'm not used to imperative programming.)

So, I want to represent some comics and comic book characters. So I make some objects.

var tony = { name: "Tony", job: "billionaire playboy philanthropist" }
var pepper = { name: "Pepper", job: "CEO of Stark Industries" }

and I say that those are the characters:

var characters = [ tony, pepper ]

and then I make up some comics:

var ironMan = { title: "Iron Man", characters: characters };
var pepperAdventures = { title: "Adventures of Pepper", characters: [pepper] };

The only problem is, Pepper isn't CEO of Stark Industries in (not real comic) "Adventures of Pepper". It's an Alternate Universe where she is a Professional Adventurer. But that's easy to fix, right?

pepperAdventures.characters[0].job = "Adventurer";

And if I look at pepperAdventures now, I see that Pepper's job is correct!

> pepperAdventures
{ title: 'Adventures of Pepper',
  character: { name: 'Pepper', job: 'Adventurer' } }

But this is where I get confused -- because Pepper is now an adventurer in Iron Man too!!

> ironMan
{ title: 'Iron Man',
  characters: 
   [ { name: 'Tony',
       job: 'billionaire playboy philanthropist' },
     { name: 'Pepper', job: 'Adventurer' } ] }

This is not good!! Stark Industries is sure to go bankrupt without Pepper!

I guess I just find this confusing because I'm not able to alter values like this in Haskell. This is what something similar might look like in Haskell:

data Character = Character { name :: String, job :: String }
data Comic = Comic { title :: String, characters :: [Characters] }

tony = Character "Tony" "billionaire playboy philanthropist"
pepper = Character "Pepper" "CEO of Stark Industries"
characters = [ tony, pepper ]

ironMan = Comic "Iron Man" characters
pepperAdventures = Comic "Adventures of Pepper" [ pepper { job = "Adventurer } ]

This results in the expected:

>pepperAdventures
Comic {
  title = "Adventures of Pepper", 
  characters = [
    Character {name = "Pepper", job = "Adventurer"}]}
>ironMan
Comic {
  title = "Iron Man", 
  characters = [
    Character {name = "Tony", job = "billionaire playboy philanthropist"},
    Character {name = "Pepper", job = "CEO of Stark Industries" }]}

That's because pepper {job = "Adventurer"} creates a new and different Character that's the same as pepper except that the "job" field is "Adventurer". It doesn't change the original pepper at all.

So it's constantly surprising when I run into these side effects in JavaScript and I find them kind of hard to understand. HOWEVER I can see how this could also be super useful and make things easier than what I'm used to!!