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JavaScript catches a lot of flack for it’s “ugliness,” but I’m rather fond of the language. It’s first-class functions make up for any quirks you have to deal with in the language. Consider this test case:

vows.describe("output generated by").addBatch(
  expectedOutput("sync-add.js", [
    "result: 2",
    "done!"
  ])
).addBatch(
  expectedOutput("async-add.js", [
    "done!",
    "result: 2"
  ])
).export(module);

It generates this output when run with --spec:

prompt> vows --spec spec/output.js
♢ output generated by

  sync-add.js
    ✓ generates 2 lines of output
    ✓ "result: 2" is line #1
    ✓ "done!" is line #2
  async-add.js
    ✓ generates 2 lines of output
    ✓ "done!" is line #1
    ✓ "result: 2" is line #2
 
✓ OK » 6 honored (0.197s)

I’m using test cases like this throughout my upcoming Programming Node.js book to test output of some of the simple scripts.

Yes, I know you can get some amazingly expressive test cases in other languages, but I dare people who say that JavaScript is any ugly language to find fault with this bit of code.