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Comment by lazyjeff | Hacker News Reader

The snarky comment seems unnecessary, "The most important difference is that JSHint is developed and supported by the JavaScript developer community and not by one very opinionated person". Douglas Crockford did a lot of great things for the JavaScript community. Considering they had just forked this, I'm not sure how they can immediately claim that theirs is supported by the JavaScript community, while JSLint is supported only by one person.

Given that, I do agree that JSLint is sometimes more strict but you can change the flags to ignore those warnings if you'd like.

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Crock's contributions are massive, I agree. I'm so glad that we've had a JSLint in the first place.

However, JSLint has gotten increasingly more opinionated in the past few months.. For example, the standard for loop: `for (var i = 0, len = arr.length; i < len; i++) { ... ` will now error out in JSLint.

A lot of these sorts of changes don't have flags to customize, so that's something that JSHint aims to fix. Start with some great defaults, and allow them to be customized. Heck, we even save your checkbox preferences for you (via localStorage).

Crock's responses to people asking for changes on the mailing list have also been a little disappointing:

"Your sadly pathetic bleatings are harshing my mellow." http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/jslint_com/message/1688

On the github project, he's refused CommonJS convention, NodeJS export support, and Rhino compat -- all quite easy to do. So until Crock's primary JSLint is a bit more friendly to customizability and different environments, JSHint will fulfill those needs.

Is there any reference for the reasoning behind error-ing on the standard for loop?

    Problem at line 1 character 6: Move 'var' declarations to the top of the function.

I do prefer having all my vars at the top of the function, loop vars are an exception though.

I think Crockford is right about that error.

Declaration of variables in the loop could lead to this type of error:

http://cam.ly/blog/2011/01/javascript-interview-question/

(All of the 4 <li> will do alert('4') when clicked, when the programmer expects alert('1'), alert('2'), etc.)

If the variable had been declared at the top, that error probably would not happen.

That error would have happened despite if the var was declared at the top or in the loop

    addEventListener("stuff", function() {
        return function(index) {
            alert(index);
        }
    }(i);

is the fix, either way

Yeah. I meant that the mistake is less likely to have been made in the first place.

It's concerned about the declaration of i within the loop's first term. Since JavaScript only has function-level scope, that variable leaks into the broader context, which can lead to unexpected behavior.

Not if you actually, you know, know what you're doing. This dumbing down of programming does not work--if you have clueless people working on code, it'll end up broken, no matter how many tool-enforced 'best practices' they follow.

I can't see why people not liking the defaults (which are great for beginners) can't change their settings.

Why would the zen master of JavaScript of which you speak have any need for JSLint in the first place? Us mere mortals are sometimes forgetful and need reminders...

Hi Paul, got an opinion on http://aresemicolonsnecessaryinjavascript.com ? I'm new to doing JS 'properly' and looking for some guidance here. Thanks.

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