I've been struggling to write this entry because my mind has been overwhelmingly conflicted this past week.

Through weekly goals, my plan has been to set some tangible short-term targets for the six months period I am giving myself for the craft of programming.

In the case of last week, my goal was to become comfortable with JavaScript, enough to be able to write my first project in this language without any external frameworks or libraries (this is also known as vanilla JS).

It's coming up to two weeks since I had set this weekly goal and, evidently, I am not quite there yet.

In fact, I'm coming to terms with how my particular approach to mastering JavaScript has not really been the most astute.

I thought that switching over from Python to JavaScript is just a matter of grasping the latter's syntax and familiarising myself with a different way of expression.

It turns out my assumption was over-simplified and rather misguided.

While there are some syntactical differences between the two languages that you certainly ought to focus on, JavaScript's true idiosyncracies lie in the fact that it is primarily a web-based language.

And it's a language that is powerful enough to be run on any web browser through the built-in console, and be written alongside HTML and CSS without breaking the codebase.

Despite its unforgiving syntax, I've got to admit it's a super neat language.

Sure, Python and JavaScript are both high-level, interpreted languages and, many times, either can be used to solve similar algorithmic challenges.

However, the true power of JavaScript is that it is the language that powers almost all software that is accessed on the internet, through its event-driven model.

Rather than trying to translate my existing programming knowledge onto this quirky new language, I feel like learning JavaScript has been nothing short of exploring a whole new paradigm.

While this acknowledgement does mean that I'm moving towards my goal much slower than anticipated, this does not mean that I'm slacking off from this personal commitment;

I'm just practicing some patience while I embark on this newfound challenge.

In fact, my first JS project is in the making, and I am excited to share it on GitHub soon.

Stay tuned! :)