When using Javascript, how can one develop and test speedly yet accurately (and focus on the algorithms rather than the mechanics)? Are there helpful tools that can be used in a batch or command line mode (i.e. outside of an IDE)?
I find when developing in Javascript I spend a tremendous amount of time locating the sorts of problems caused by careless typing or brain farts: misspelled variable names, misspelled property names, missing functions, wrong number of arguments to a function, and so forth.
A tool needs to understand the "semantics" of the language to find errors like this (what's a variable name, what's a function name, and so forth). In my experience, tools like JSLint/JSHint that look only at the "syntax" aren't very helpful. They emit a huge flood of stylistic warnings that are largely irrelevant, yet still don't identify the errors that really matter.
Without a "coverage" tool and many weeks of testing, errors in the uncommon paths often sneak through. It's not unusual to have a corpus of Javascript in production for months, and only then find some obscure crash error.
In Perl I can just "use strict" and my program won't even run until I fix these, and Perl's "warnings" quickly identifies most of the rest. How can Javascript development do something similar?
