Interview with Esa-Matti Suuronen, developer of underscore.string

This time we'll be discussing with Esa-Matti Suuronen of Opinsys. A company known for its Linux based thin client solutions used in educational sector. Esa-Matti or Epeli or just @EsaMatti is particularly known for his underscore.string library and has published several high profile posts over at his blog.

Time for some questions!

First of all, how did you end up developing underscore.string? Why did it become such a success?

I was looking for a library that would provide some missing bits from the Javascript standard library I was used to in some other languages. I asked this Stackoverflow question which lead me to the Underscore.js which did implement everything I needed except the string extensions. Since I had already quite a few string helper functions lying around it was pretty simple to put Underscore.string together.

The popularity comes pretty much by piggybacking on the success of Underscore.js. Quite soon after I released it Jeremy Ashkenas offered to link to it from the Undescore.js page and being probably the only proper Javascript string library with tests at the time. Also Big part of any even remotely successful library is maintaining the project and I definitely cannot take the credit for that. I gotta give big thanks to @edtsech and @rwz for taking care of the project. Thanks!

Are there any other projects you would like to specifically mention?

Backbone.ViewMaster. When I first started with Backbone.js the biggest trouble for me was how to manage nested views views with it. Since I'm a big believer of small and decoupled components and in Backbone.js your basic component is a View. I ended up doing a lot of those. Originally I planned to just first work my way with plain Backbone.js and then to migrate to something like Marionette.js when I actually would see the need for it. But soon I realized that I had already solved my biggest issues with just a small base View I was inheriting from. Since I already had documented it for my colleagues I ended up releasing it as a library. If you just need help with view nesting with Backbone.js I think ViewMaster can take you a long way with just 1kb of additional code.

What reasons drove you from RequireJS to Browserify? How do you see the future of modular JavaScript?

Well, I wasn't very happy with RequireJS even when I first started with it because I mostly use node.js for my backend needs so CommonJS based solution would have been a much better fit for me. But back then I didn't feel that there where any flexible and robust enough solutions out there until Browserify v2 was released. For a long time resisted using RequireJS. I even created Piler which was a module system agnostic solution for packing and compiling Javascript modules.

If you had to start a JavaScript project (say a client and a backend for that) right now, what tools would you use? Why?

I would use everything mentioned here.

Backbone.js. Combined with ViewMaster it gives me just enough features I need without getting too much in the way.

Node.js. The apps I'm building today are so client heavy it doesn't really make sense to use any other language for the 10% of the code I write for the backend and node.js is definitely the best Javascript server-side solution out there. Also I quite often leverage Websockets and I think node.js still has the best tools working with those. For the server-side frameworks I don't have that strong opinions. I would probably go with Express since it's very well supported and maintained.

What kind of advice would you provide for JavaScript newcomers?