It has somehow become the most complex, elaborate, time-consuming, fragile, and convoluted platform for writing software.

My experience is essentially "Omg, this is absurd. Who on earth thought this was a good idea? Of course this woudn't work. This is terrible. What a bug-ridden piece of ... wow, this is incredible. Oh it's busy-polling, how novel ... Who the hell wrote this crap?" The most frustrating, aggravating, and irritating platform.

After an hour or two, I honestly want to smash things against the wall. This does not happen with C, python, java, perl or PHP. But with JS, I have to watch out because I end up grinding my teeth in the sheer idiocy of the ecosystem. Am I alone here?

Edit

To all the haters out there I thought this was relevant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpUNA2nutbk

Why

I have been working on a parser for JavaScript since around November. The original intention was to create a beautifier (pretty printer). At the time I had a 3 year old fork of jsbeautifier but ran into a problem that complicated the algorithm too much. So, I wrote my own parser to start from as I thought this would allow me flexibility to avoid those kinds of problems moving forward.

Features so far

I am still using this thing primarily as a beautifier and wondering what other uses I could get out of a parser. Here are the extra features I have come up with so far:

• Coloring variables by scope

• Automatic code corrections to bring code closer to JSLint/JSHint compliance

• Pointing out code habits that I personally disagree with like missing semicolons and unnecessary use of new.

What should this do?

What features should I add to this? What kind of helpful things could I do with a parser? What would anybody else like to see out of this?

Where is it?

Code -

• https://github.com/austincheney/Pretty-Diff/blob/master/lib/jspretty.js

• http://prettydiff.com/lib/jspretty.js

Demo -

• Regular Beautification

• Beautification with some Auto-Correction

• Beautification with Colored Scope Identification

• Beautification with Auto-Correction and Scope Coloring