Interactive Fiction : React – Redux

Posted on by admin Interactive Fiction, JavaScript, React, Typescript

Rebuilt the Interactive Fiction Player in React + Redux .

The Shivers

[Update 25/September/2019]
Refactored everything to Functional Components and made Hook based. Have added Jest Testing, and optimised with lighthouse.

[Update 16/March/2019]
Crossed my mind that the game engine might be more interesting if it could add some random elements. Maybe take it in a direction where it could run games similar to those from the series of Fighting Fantasy adventure books . I’m not sure if it will but I have added a dice roll to the game engine and also dealt with 10 months of technical debt so I’ve bumped up to the latest react version, migrated from CSS to styled-components and moved from JavaScript to TypeScript.

I decided to rebuild the Interactive Fiction Player using React and Redux. It still uses the same data structure so the same games can be played in the Angular version.

Previous post about Version 1 which was built with Angular / Typescript https://www.markhorsell.com/2017/03/interactive-fiction-angular-typescript/

JavaScript or EcmaScript

Posted on by admin ActionScript, Dart, JavaScript, Typescript

I’ve just started looking for a new Job and after a few calls from the Agencies, there’s one question which I’m finding hard to answer.

How many years of JavaScript experience do you have?

I think the question should really be.

How long have you been using EcmaScript and which versions?

So whilst I have been using JavaScript for 17 years and I could just say that, in reality it’s changed a lot in that time and then for much of that time it wasn’t something I was using full time.

For years I was using Actionscript 3, you might know that it’s an ES4 language, which counter-intuitively has much more in common with ES6 aka ES2015 aka Harmony, Typescript and Google Dart than it does with ES5!

But how could ES4 have those features if they weren’t in ES5? Well ES4 was ambitious it added Classes and more to JavaScript and it got bogged down politically. In 2007 it was abandoned and the standards committee went for a less radical update, however, Adobe had the freedom to add whatever they liked to their own VM in the Flash Player and they went ahead, it’s only relatively recently that it’s features are appearing in the browsers thanks to ES6 and Babel.

And then just to confuse the agencies, even more, there’s TypeScript, which some refer to as ES2016+ or ES+! But try explaining that to a recruiter and most would just glaze over.

This article explains what happened to ES4.
EcmaScript 4 was too far ahead of its time

Brendan Eich’s feelings about the abandonment of ES4, worth reading the comments if you’re curious about why it happened, but a lot of suspicion around it being a political move by Microsoft to hold the web back.
https://brendaneich.com/2007/11/es4-news-and-opinion/

This shows where ES4 fits in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript

And if you’ve never seen AS3 then here’s a link so you can see how similar it is to ES6.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActionScript#ActionScript_3.0

John Papa’s thoughts on whether Typescript should be referred to as  ES+
https://johnpapa.net/es5-es2015-typescript/