Which isn’t fair, really, because (as I’ve said many a time) most people don’t actually hate JavaScript the language; they hate the buggy and inconsistent implementations of JavaScript in major web browsers and, to a larger extent, the buggy and inconsistent implementations of the DOM in major browsers.

Which is why as I have said before I do not like and do not advocate the use of JavaScript libraries. At first glance this may seem hypocriticial given you could argue that the LocalHero code repository is a JavaScript library in itself. However as I have said before LocalHero Code is not a library just a collection of useful functions and ways to harmonise browser behaviour. It is not an attempt to change the way the language should behave or abstract it.

In summary JavaScript on its own is a pretty good language. Which apart from browser inconsistent is very capable of being utilised to create some pretty sophisticated software without libraries. But if you net convinced here are some other reasons.

Why you should not uses libraries

1. Most libraries are bloated. The user may load a full library for effect, but in many cases the effect could be achieved in a few lines of code.

2. They unnecessarily abstract the code making debugging difficult. If something goes wrong it could be your code or the library code and it may be hard to determine which. Indeed libraries like prototype.js actually change the language behavior so much that people have likened prototype to crack cocaine.

3. Libraries remove the reason to learn JavaScript deeper. indeed because they may change language behaviour they may make it harder. As a result poorly written code proliferates this time on libraries.

4. It is really hard to create something really good with universal tool. A standalone script can generally be be optimized much better then library based one.

Aren’t actually faster

But my main problem with libraries are that for complex projects they slow down develpoment.

With ongoing complex projects you are generally extending and enhancing your work continuously. Because of this level of complexity you will generally find yourself having to understand how the entire code base (including the library) actually works. And in programming reconstructing somone elses logic can be more time consuming than actually writing it yourself. This can be even more unfortunate when if you discover there work is flawed and you DO have to write it yourself!

Bottom line don’t use JavaScript libraries.

Lerderderg Gorge State Park is less than an hour’s drive from home but I’d never been there. (I’ve asked this question before but I need to ask it again â what on earth have I been doing with my time?). Anyway, to redress this appalling lack, I headed out to the Gorge last Friday with a friend and we had a look at all of the plants and some of the animals.

The SP covers more than 14,000 hectares of eucalypt woodland. At the southern end, it’s dry and rocky, with a number of rare and endangered plants. The dominant trees are blue manna (Eucalyptus globulus) and manna gum (E. viminalis) along the river and red box (E. polyanthemos) on the ridges. At the northern end, the tall forest is mostly messmate (E. obliqua) with narrow-leaved peppermint (E. radiata). In between is an interesting sequence of box and box ironbark woodland, which seems to change rapidly from one type to the next.

The Lerderderg River rises near Blackwood and cuts a concertina of meanders through the hills until it joins the Werribee River on the coastal plain. The gorge is Lower Ordovician sandstone and mudstone shot through with veins of quartz. The sediments were laid down about 470 million years ago in a shallow sea.

Since then, it’s been tilted and turned and uplifted by a succession of faults …

… but has survived all that geological manhandling in remarkably good nick.

And there’s gold in them thar hills.

Koalas are common here but we didn’t see their furry arses wedged in the manna gums. This seems to be the pattern. I’m beginning to suspect they’re hiding from us. Neither were echidnas or kangaroos terribly obvious but the wombats had made their presence felt. Well, one wombat, which had marked its territory with great enthusiasm. Like lots of other mammals, they warn off intruders with judiciously placed poo. Wombats take great care with the location, preferring to leave their boundary markers on logs and stones. How they manage some of those sites is difficult to comprehend. They’re not the most acrobatic of animals but maybe they have hidden skills.

Although we had no luck with the mammals, the birds were out and about in great numbers. Crimson rosellas chatted to each other in the woodland canopy, while the currawongs and white-winged choughs stayed on the ridges. Small flocks of silvereyes moved through the trees, feeding on the brightly-coloured berries of fragrant saltbush (Rhagodia parabolica). (More about that tomorrow.) They were accompanied by yellow-faced honeyeaters, striated pardalotes and numerous LBJs, all of which were no doubt thrillingly rare and unusual but remain unidentified. A sacred kingfisher kept an eye on us for a while, until a laughing kookaburra took over the surveillance.

More about the northern end of the park soon. In the meantime, here are some of the botanical beauties of the bush

Fragrant saltbush (Rhagodia parabolica) is widespread in inland South Australia but is very limited in Victoria.

Mistletoe (Amyema pendulum) on yellow gum (Eucalyptus leucoxylon).

Native elderberry (Sambucus gaudichardiana) has edible berries but we left these for the birds.

Mistletoe (Muellerina eucalyptoides) on yellow box (E. melliodora). Its roots insinuate themselves along the branches in a slightly sinister way.

Forest germander (Teucrium corymbosum) occurs in the damper areas along the river bank.

Rock clefts provide protection for smaller plants including this purslane (Calandrinia)

Stonecrop (Crassula) is one of a handful of succulents in Australia.

Necklace fern (Asplenium flabellifolium)

Staring about as I often do I am amazed at the faces and manner of my fellow passengers. Most stare blankly, mutely, forward looking into space looking into nothing. I often wonder why? Maybe a hard day at work? But at 1.00 o’clock on a Friday afternoon!

Those who are animated talk loudly, annoyingly, down mobile phone’s, or tap away on laptops, or nod their chin slightly to a vaguely audible sound I can hear on from headphone’s. Am missing something, anything?

I think they are.

They are traveling on perhaps the best vehicle yet invented to see the sights, sounds, and going ons of a beautiful city. They are travelling with some of the most interesting people your ever likely to meet… normal people. I find it ironic that those with there heads buried in lifestyle and society magazines are missing the great drama that is going on all around them.

I guess I’m unusual I often start conversations on the tram, but I guess I find it surprising that others don’t. Over the past few weeks I’ve met American bomb specialists in town for a conference, a history professor who splits his time equally between Germany and Australia, a young South African about to be married to an Australian, a medical student on her way to a night out with friends, and many others. All interesting people with a story to tell. All you have to do is ask.

One thing that has always struck me about all those people shouting down phones, tapping on palm pilots, and listening to walkman’s is what they are missing out on. They are all focused on getting to where they are going a minimising the time spent in between. They forget that the journey, what they are doing there and then is important, its not the destination, its the journey.

What motivates people to think like that, I don’t know. Maybe its a distrust of others, such behaviour is certainly more common in big cities. Maybe its the self obsessed nature of so many people today. Again it hard to tell, I’m certainly not immune to navel gazing, yet retain an interests in others. Who knows whatever it is, it seems the more we are connected by electronics and the like with our friends and acquaintances, the more we are cut off from our fellow man.

Can it be cured it seems not. Today we are more inclined to talk to dogs and babies on the street than strangers. Dogs and babies don’t talk back. Indeed in Los Angeles recently the highest reward money posted was for the arrest of a man who threw a dog in front of a car in an incident of road rage. It seems society really has screwed priorities.

I don’t know if I’m different maybe its because I’m from the country, maybe I’m naturally friendly. Whatever it is I believe being friendly is one of the most important things to be, Anyway, whatever the reason I hope I’m never the one staring blankly forward into space or talking annoyingly on the mobile phone on the number 8 tram in Melbourne

Basketball riots in Los Angeles, football riots in Belgium. The weekend seemed to be full of mob violence, destruction and thuggery. Grown men on rampages of destruction. In the modern world, it seems that for all our technical achievements, our ordered society, and our high culture, we have not come that far. Just below the surface, barbarism is always there.

Civilization, at least for some, is only skin deep. 

One thing that struck me about the riots was the surprising fact that these events occurred as the result of wins. The L.A. Lakers win in the N.B.A. Championship final, and England wins the European Championships. These riots were not acts of frustration or anger, but of celebration. It may seem strange to say that while I do not condone rioting when one’s team loses, I can understand it. Frustration and anger are natural human emotions that all too often boil over into violence.

But riots as a form of celebration are harder to comprehend. These people, as they threw chairs, beat up foreigners, and charged police, were truly doing it because they enjoyed it. They were willing participants in what was truly an orgy of violence. Watching on the TV as crowds in L.A. set fire to a car and proceeded to dance around it in the manner of The Lord of the Flies, I was struck that the human condition really hasn’t come very far. These could easily have been cavemen dancing around the fire, celebrating victory over their enemy, but they weren’t. They were modern men dancing around the burnt-out body of someone’s car, celebrating the comparatively trivial victory in a game of basketball.

So for all the pessimism, what can we learn from this? What can keep the rest of our society from sliding into the violence and stupidity that these sporadic uprisings represent?

Many would credit such things to our concepts of the law, justice, and democracy, and it is true. I believe these play no small part. Without them the preservation of order in our society would be impossible. But they are as much the outward forms of a much more important thing, as they are the causes.

The most important thing in my opinion is public morality. Public morals, social norms, whatever you want to call it, is the true glue that holds our society together. It is the collection of society’s expectations of its own members, enforced not by the blunt coercive force of statute, but by the less brutal but equally powerful stick-and-carrot methods of condemnation and approval.

Some may doubt it, but the social mechanism is one of the most powerful. So much of what we do every day is geared towards seeking the approval of our peers. Indeed it is the yardstick by which we judge and are judged. It is so powerful that many have been willing to die rather than face that most unforgiving of juries, public opinion.

If you doubt the veracity of my claim, consider the recent riot by English supporters in Belgium. Consider that those who were rioting were not doing so just because they could. Rioting in a group did not prevent hundreds from being arrested. They did it because others were doing it. They did it because the public morality, or rather amorality, of the rioting mob approved and encouraged that behavior. None of their friends or professional colleagues were around, and, don’t forget, many of these men had professional jobs, yet they were part of a mob. The final fact that demonstrates the truth of this is the film of the arrested rioters as they returned to England: no longer proud hooligans but little boys hiding behind their coats, caps, or whatever they had to disguise their shame.

Are there lessons to be learnt from all this, that can transcend the violence?

Public morality, although in decline, is still the most powerful force in our society. Society will continue to have its problems. Some are criminal problems that despite our best efforts we cannot control or stop. Others are social problems, that whilst outside the scope of the law are nevertheless destructive to society . We have high crime rates, rising drug use, family breakup, and unmarried teenage pregnancy. We try to tackle these problems head-on, sometimes with laws, and sometimes with education. But sometimes we forget about the most powerful tool, public morality.

We forget that the most powerful influence on any person is his peers. If drug use was unacceptable amongst young people, it would not persist long. If users were seen to be losers, and pushers the criminals they are, then the drug problem would not persist. If those parents who abandoned their parental obligations were exposed as the irresponsible fools they are, then the problem would lessen.

In the end, laws can only go so far. Society has to enforce standards independent of the courts, the police, and the statute books. In a society where increasingly anything goes, it is important for the media, politicians, and society as a whole to take firm positions and strongly condemn behaviors that are unacceptable. Coercion in the form of laws has limited application. In the end, people have to want to do the right thing in order for society to prosper.