"Help me fix this program!"

As I understand it, all the parameters passed to the functions are initialized before any of them are executed. So let's take a look at the code:

alert("Help me fix this program!");
alert("Can you get this message to appear?");
document.write("<h2>My first JavaScript program</h2>");
document.write("<p>I'm practicing 'debugging'.</p>");

Now remove any one of the " marks from inside the parantheses from any one line of the code, and none of it will execute. For example, stripping out the final " mark from the final line like so:

document.write("<p>I'm practicing 'debugging'.</p>);

will result in neither the alerts nor the document.writes running. However, if you make a mistake in the actual writing of the function, like missing a t in alert or a w in document.write, the code will execute until that line is encountered. For example, the following code will show both alerts and the first document.write:

alert("Help me fix this program!");
alert("Can you get this message to appear?");
document.write("<h2>My first JavaScript program</h2>");
document.rite("<p>I'm practicing 'debugging'."</p>");

Why is this? Like I said earlier, all the params are being initialized first, so as I understand it, all the params get checked for validity, and the system throws an error if any one of them is invalid. This error happens before any of the code is executed, and since running the code halts at an error, none of the code runs.

Conversely, if all the params are valid, it does run each line, in order, and only halts if there is an error in the exectution of a line.

That's my understanding, anyway. Hope this helps!