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A couple of developers forked JSLint and created JSHint, partly because they claim the author of JSLint, Douglas Crockford, is too “opinionated.”
According to the project’s web site, “JSHint is a fork of Douglas Crockford’s JSLint that does not tyrannize your code.”
And on Hacker News, one of the JSHint creators, Paul Irish, said, “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.”
While that code may be a bit sloppy, JSHint offers more configuration options than JSLint to make it possible for developers to create a global variable in a loop without throwing an error, Crockford is dismissive.
Responding to one user’s criticism, Crockford said, “Your sadly pathetic bleatings are harshing my mellow.”
So now there are two open source JavaScript error detection services:JSHint and JSLint. JSLint warns that it will “hurt your feelings,” but both projects have the same license, “The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.”
