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If you're writing modern nodeJS you're probably not using callbacks or promises (directly) anymore (or using promises a lot less than you used to - Promise.all

by vosper 6y ago

If you're writing modern nodeJS you're probably not using callbacks or promises (directly) anymore (or using promises a lot less than you used to - Promise.all and Promise.allSettled is about it for me, and that's not that often). The async/await syntax is where it's at. Honestly it's a massive improvement over promises, which I hated reasoning about almost as much as callbacks :)

charlieflowers 6y ago
And ... C# _invented_ the async/await syntax. Node, Rust, etc., were all inspired by what C# did.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> If you're writing modern nodeJS you're probably not using callbacks or promises (directly) anymore I get that some people prefer async/await (I actually find explicit Promises clear enough that I don't have any strong preference, myself), but why wouldn't you be using explicit callbacks, which in my JS experience (mostly frontend, but also fairly modern) are super common outside of promises, which is the only place where I see modern JS replacing exlicit callbacks with a different structure.
- vosper 6y ago
  Yeah, callbacks are fine until you get a big stack of them (so-called “callback hell”). Promises were the touted solution to callback hell, async/await the touted solution to endless promises chaining. While async/await is (tasty) syntactic sugar for promises, I think it’s a real improvement over callbacks - it’s one less argument to every function (because of promises) and I think it’s easier to read: there tends to be less nesting.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    The weird thing about async/await is that it gets you out of deeply nested callbacks into, pretty much by definition, exactly equally deeply nested async function calls. The only thing that seems different is that it seems to be more common (but not any more or less supported, since you can obviously have named non-async functions and you can also have anonymous async functions) to call named functions in async/await and anonymous functions defined inline as callbacks with promises.

by vosper 6y ago

charlieflowers 6y ago

And ... C# _invented_ the async/await syntax. Node, Rust, etc., were all inspired by what C# did.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> If you're writing modern nodeJS you're probably not using callbacks or promises (directly) anymore I get that some people prefer async/await (I actually find explicit Promises clear enough that I don't have any strong preference, myself), but why wouldn't you be using explicit callbacks, which in my JS experience (mostly frontend, but also fairly modern) are super common outside of promises, which is the only place where I see modern JS replacing exlicit callbacks with a different structure.

vosper 6y ago
Yeah, callbacks are fine until you get a big stack of them (so-called “callback hell”). Promises were the touted solution to callback hell, async/await the touted solution to endless promises chaining. While async/await is (tasty) syntactic sugar for promises, I think it’s a real improvement over callbacks - it’s one less argument to every function (because of promises) and I think it’s easier to read: there tends to be less nesting.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  The weird thing about async/await is that it gets you out of deeply nested callbacks into, pretty much by definition, exactly equally deeply nested async function calls. The only thing that seems different is that it seems to be more common (but not any more or less supported, since you can obviously have named non-async functions and you can also have anonymous async functions) to call named functions in async/await and anonymous functions defined inline as callbacks with promises.