Spooky Programming

Let us imagine we have a list, contains three letters, “a”, “b”, and “c”;

Most teachers will ask you to use a loop, which will deliver each of the letters to you separately.

Inside the body of the loop that delivers one letter at t a time, you just say print letter.

You should know how to do this, to build a system, that does it correctly in the age of the web.

In a web page, the list is sure to change, the letters could be users, or emails, or todo items.

So you will need to know when the list changes, calling update_ui() after you make a change is not possible.

Because this type of complexity only grows, you will have nested lists, parent lists, and sub lists.

At which point, what does update_ui() update, what does it even means.

Well, it means it won’t work.

You need to make your list reactive, by extending array, and returning an object proxy that monitors for changes.

And then give your list a subscribe method, just like you have an add mechanism.

You will need a subscription mechanism, to be notified when the array changed.

You give the subscribe a function to execute, called subscriber, and it will execute it each time there was a change.

An object proxy has a get and set, so you can tell when a user is just reading, and when they are changing.

You also need to monitor for adding and deleting actions, 9+ actions in total.

“push", "pop", "shift", "unshift", "splice", "sort", "reverse", "fill", "copyWithin".

And ask AI to double check, as new methods may be added, as JavaScript gets updates.

But knowing that there was a change is not enough, especially because you likely already added stuff to the web page.

That means you only update, what you already created.

So you need to know what was deleted, to delete the thing in the area of the web page you are working on.

You need to know what was added, to add the new thing.

And you need to know what was moved, so that you can reorder things that already exist.

More over, you may not want to delete things, that is such a violent thing to when carefully managing resources.

You may wish to mark something as deleted, so that a tiny internal deletion process of that thing kicks off.

What this calls for is a diff and patch operation, which is as simple as you can make it.

Check what was deleted, put in in your diff list as a delete operation.

Check what was added, and put it in the diff list under operation add.

And then what was moved, and note which index moved where.

Finally, you interpret your diff list, by applying a patch to what was in your web page.

Patching means updating, only in the places that have changed, like repairing socks.

Spooky, yes, but if you are just learning programming.

And drawing life lines with life extension, exercise and healthy diet, add-ons…

Or space travel lines with moving pixels showing time dilation, is not for you…

Because it feels like you are moving away from programming, then studying Reactive Variables may just be for you.

In the age of powerful programming AI everywhere, studying reactive systems is fun, and interesting, enjoyable.

Not at all as spooky as I made it out to be, so as long as you ask for simple and lightweight JavaScript code.

Reactive Programming, is something you put first in your Resume/CV, it is something to be very proud of, and very hard to let go.

Once you get the AI to create enough implementations, or variations for you, it is not at all a challenge.

But it is indistinguishable from magic, and it makes you a proper Sorceress or Wizard.