Question

Imagine an interface where the only way to find out whether a key on the keyboard is being pressed is to read the current state of that key. To be able to react to keypresses, you would have to constantly read the key’s state so that you’d catch it before it’s released again. It would be dangerous to perform other time-intensive computations since you might miss a keypress.

That is how such input was handled on primitive machines. A step up would be for the hardware or operating system to notice the keypress and put it in a queue. A program can then periodically check the queue for new events and react to what it finds there.

Of course, it has to remember to look at the queue, and to do it often, because any time between the key being pressed and the program noticing the event will cause the software to feel unresponsive. This approach is called polling. Most programmers avoid it whenever possible.

A better mechanism is for the underlying system to give our code a chance to react to events as they occur. Browsers do this by allowing us to register functions as handlers for specific events.

<p>Click this document to activate the handler.</p>
<script>
  addEventListener("click", function() {
    console.log("You clicked!");
  });
</script>

The addEventListener function registers its second argument to be called whenever the event described by its first argument occurs.

This is a book about getting computers to do what you want them to do. Computers are about as common as screwdrivers today, but they contain a lot more hidden complexity and thus are harder to operate and understand. To many, they remain alien, slightly threatening things.