Joshua is not new
While I was at the DevHouse, I mentioned Joshua to some people. Kragen pointed me to Jesse Ruderman’s JavaScript Shell. Alright, so it’s been done before. In fact, Jesse does everything I wanted and more, and is even more clever in implementation.
Then later, David pointed me to MochiKit’s Interpreter demo. Well, that wasn’t as impressive, but still. I was under the impression this hadn’t been done before as well as it should be.
It’s funny to think that if I didn’t make Joshua, I wouldn’t have learned about these other shells because I wouldn’t have brought it up at the DevHouse. By the way, that’s one of the great things about the DevHouse. Everything’s been done before, and if you can’t find it yourself, somebody at the DevHouse can show you.
Not that this is a bad thing. I’m game for a little friendly competition. It’ll help make a really nice JavaScript console in the end. So far, even though I haven’t actually used it for real-life debugging in a project yet, Joshua’s proved very handy when playing with new ideas in JavaScript.