In praise of help() in Python's REPL
For various reasons, I'm doing a bit of JavaScript/CoffeeScript work at the moment, which involves use of some functions in the core libraries which I'd not really used in the past. A minor aspect of this involves logarithmic values, and I was a bit surprised and then disappointed that JavaScript's Math.log() isn't as flexible as its Python near-namesake math.log():
# Python
>>> math.log(256,2) # I want the result for base 2
8.0
versus
# CoffeeScript
coffee> Math.log(256,2)
Math.log(256,2)
5.545177444479562
Now, it's probably unreasonable of me to expect the JavaScript version of this function to behave exactly the same as the Python version, especially as the (presumably) underlying C function only takes a single value argument. (Although it might have been nice to get a warning about the ignored second argument, rather than silence...)
On the other hand though, it reminded me of how much more civilized Python is compared to JavaScript. When I'm hacking around, I almost always have a spare window open with a running REPL process, that allows me to quickly check and test stuff, and can very easily pull up the docs via the help() function if I need further info. In contrast, to do the same in JavaScript I have to move over to a browser window and search for info on sites like MDN, or resort to my trusty copies of The Definitive Guide, neither of which are anywhere near as convenient.
After a brief bit of Googling and a plea for help on Twitter, I was unable to find any equivalent to this functionality in the JavaScript world - and let's face it, help() is pretty basic stuff when compared to what the likes of IPython and bpython offer the fortunate Python developer.
I'd love to be corrected on this, and be told about some nice CLI-tool for JavaScript that can help me out. (But not some overblown IDE that would require me to radically change my established development environment, I hasten to add!) I'm not expecting this to happen though - Python's help() relies heavily on docstrings, and I'm not aware that anything such as JsDoc is in common usage in the JavaScript community?
RSS feed for this blog