Powerless Javascript

I was writing a small javascript function, part of which needed to evaluate 10 to the power of a parameter – I couldn’t remember what the exponentiation operator is in javascript so as usually I hit F12 and typed the following into the console:

10**3

jspower

Wrote and tested the code, checked in to source control. Job done.

A few days later we deployed a new release that included dozens of bug fixes into UAT for testing. Soon after a tester showed me a screen where a lot of stuff wasn’t looking right, and things that had been working for a long time was not working at all.

Developer: “It works fine on my machine.”

After some playing around on their browser I noted that it seemed half of the javascript code I’d written was not running at all. A look at their browser console revealed two things:

  1. they are using Internet Explorer 11
  2. a compilation error was accusing the line with the ** operator

The error meant that all javascript following that point in the file was never executed, causing the strange behaviour experienced by the testers.

A bit of googling revealed that the ** operator was only added to javascript relatively recently and was supported by Chrome 52 and Edge browser but not IE. So I quickly rewrote it to use Math.pow(n,m) and applied a quick patch to UAT to get things back on track.

I think there’s a lesson there somewhere. Probably, the lesson is something like “if you try drive-by javascript coding, you’re gonna have a bad time.”