Many operators and other symbols in programming languages consist of multiple characters, but still represent a single token. Although as programmers we learned to view these symbols as single logical units, ligatures allow joining of multiple neighboring letters into a single glyph. With correct fonts and editor support these can be used to improve the rendering of source code on screen.
After taking a closer look at continuous testing of JavaScript code, I'm moving on to other languages that transpile to JavaScript. I'll mostly be focusing on TypeScript, but there aren't many differences with other languages. I'll mention some of them at the end of this post.
Unit testing is a crucial part of development in any language, but its even more important in dynamically typed and interpreted languages such as JavaScript because there's no compiler doing at least basic validation of the code. Just like in .NET development, quick feedback is very valuable, and nothing can beat continuous testing in this field.
Since WebStorm is my JavaScript IDE of choice, I also wanted to be able to debug my Grunt scripts directly inside it. WebStorm has built-in support for debugging all kinds of Node.js scripts, including Gruntfiles written in JavaScript or CoffeeScript. It just needs to be configured correctly.