Superbowl thoughts.

Yes, as a New Englander, I'm disappointed that the Pats didn't win. However, seeing the Pats win was tertiary to me. It was on the list, but the PRIMARY thing I wanted to do was go over to my Nonnie and Papa's house and spend time with them, my father, my aunt and uncle, one of my cousins, and a cat. And guys on that side of the family don't usually say, "Hey! I'd like to spend time with you, because I love you!" So, "Can we come over to watch the Superbowl, because you just got that really great television for Christmas?" is a good excuse.

The second thing I wanted to see was a really good football game, and I saw that. There were some brilliant plays, on both sides, and some absolutely heartbreaking fumbles. There were two drives by the Pats where they did everything right and it was just beautiful to see. Lis's comment was, "Well, the Patriots played a very good middle of the game . . . "

The third thing I wanted to see was the Patriots win the Superbowl. But, as Meatloaf says, "Now, don't be sad/'Cause two out of three ain't bad."

I've been doing the Codecademy CodeYear

I don't program. I haven't programmed since college; I'm not a coder. But someone, probably Lis, pointed me to codeacademy.com which is doing Code Year. They send you an exercise a week, and you do it, and it teaches you to code.

So far, we haven't hit anything I don't remember from sophomore year of high school. I'm having to knock off a little bit of rust, but it's all easy stuff.

The thing is . . . CodeYear is teaching JavaScript. And I'm already, after only five weeks, starting to develop an allergy to JavaScript.

High school computer science class was taught in Pascal, which, whatever its failings as a language to actually WORK in, is an excellent pedagogical language. Then I taught myself C, by going through the classic K&R. I never got the hang of Lisp/Scheme, but did manage to claw my way to a vague comprehension of C++.

The thing about JavaScript is that it just feels sloppy. I like declaring variable types before using them. It makes me think things through before starting.

Anyway, so far, Code Year hasn't thrown anything at me that I didn't do in high school. But we'll see what comes down the pike.

Edited to Add:

I just posted a question to the Codecademy team:

You can create an object property just by using it? Isn't that just BEGGING for trouble?

If we use the "var foo = new Object()" construction, and then fill in the properties using "foo.property1 = VALUE" and so forth, aren't we just asking for trouble, when we later on try to reassign foo.property1, but accidentally assign the value to foo.Property1? And then we later try to access foo.property1, but we don't know that we've accidentally got both a property1 and a Property1 in there. . .

Is that actually what would happen?

So, I'll ask it here, too.

Am I understanding that right? If so, how do people deal with that?

Edited to Add: As per the request in the comments, I just changed "Code Academy" to "Codecademy", since they're actually different organizations. Sorry about that, and thanks for the correction!