3 ms·

> There's no need to be rude. I didn't intend to be rude (I'm sorry for any offense it might have caused). It was a general complaint not aimed at you or anyo

by hajile 5y ago

> There's no need to be rude. I didn't intend to be rude (I'm sorry for any offense it might have caused). It was a general complaint not aimed at you or anyone else in particular. > A newcomer who encounters the closure method, on the other hand, has to mentally reverse-engineer how it works and what its goal is if they haven't seen that pattern before, because closures are much more general than classes and because returning a closure is less common and its behavior less obvious compared to other ways closures tend to be used in JS. The second part here is simply not the case. If you want to use any bundler or build tool created in the past 15 years, it's going to use closures for anything but the most recent projects. CommonJS which is still ubiquitous in NodeJS is literally closures. When it was created, it literally wrapped your file in a function that passed in some variables like global or import then called eval on the module it had now created. Before CommonJS, there was AMD (asynchronous module definition). Before that, libraries would wrap themselves in an IIFE which returned only the public parts of the library. If someone doesn't know how the module pattern works, they are a junior JS dev and absolutely cannot move on with their career until they understand. At that point, there should be zero issues with them using the pattern. > It's a tired trope that every single feature associated with Java or C# is "just there to make Java and C# programmers feel comfortable" and is therefore invalid and useless. When you look into the people pushing for these features, you almost always find a Java or C# developer. There's not a mass push by JS devs to add these features. In the case of private variables, it seemed to be more-or-less the JS community vs the spec committee and the committee just ignored what most devs wanted (without any evidence) because they thought they knew best. > The only footgun I've encountered with the ES class syntax is when passing classInstance.someMethod as a value (`this` is normally unbound because the method exists on the prototype instead of the instance). This is too big of a topic for here, but there are many pieces of weirdness in the JS prototypal system. Classes don't fix them, they just add another layer of abstraction with its own rules (eg, methods aren't enumerable). There are lots of footguns and other people run into them even if you and your particular set of devs do not.

brundolf 5y ago
> If you want to use any bundler or build tool created in the past 15 years, it's going to use closures for anything but the most recent projects. CommonJS which is still ubiquitous in NodeJS is literally closures. When it was created, it literally wrapped your file in a function that passed in some variables like global or import then called eval on the module it had now created. These are all implementation details; they couldn't matter less to most application developers. I've been writing JS for a decade and while I roughly knew that bundlers did something like this, I've never once had to deal with it directly. > If someone doesn't know how the module pattern works, they are a junior JS dev and absolutely cannot move on with their career until they understand. This is extremely not true. Knowing how modules are implemented under the hood is a concern of people who work on bundlers, transpilers, etc. For regular devs, an airtight abstraction is presented and it never needs to be more than that. It's wildly wrong to suggest that a person can't be productive at more than a junior level without knowing how this particular sausage is made. > When you look into the people pushing for these features, you almost always find a Java or C# developer. There's not a mass push by JS devs to add these features. Hello. I'm a JS dev who hasn't written Java or C# in over six years, who wouldn't want to write either of them, and yet I think private class members are valuable enough to have them in the language. > even if you and your particular set of devs do not I'm talking about the average JS dev doing mainstream JS work, here. I argue that ES classes are useful and mostly devoid of footguns for most, realistic, usage in industry. Not just for myself or for one particular team. In all I think you're taking a fairly extreme purist stance, where people are disallowed from being productive with a given technology unless they have a deep understanding of how it works underneath. That deep understanding is great to have - it's part of what makes a good lead dev - but plenty of people out there are plenty effective working off of provided abstractions, and it's narrow-minded to dismiss that fact.
- hajile 5y ago
  Let's look at the most popular JS books over the past decade. * JS modules are in the seminal "Javascript: The Good Parts". * "Eloquent Javascript" has an entire chapter called "modules" and that has existed across all three versions * "Javascript: The Definitive Guide" also has a section on modules. * Javascript.info contains an entire section about modules. * "Exploring JS" contains a section on the module pattern. * "You Don't Know JS" has even more about it. I don't see how someone could know JS as a senior or even mid-level developer without having read at least one of these sources let alone the years-long barrage of blog articles. I can say with 100% certainty that you cannot write properly using any modern framework without understanding closures (of which modules are one of the easiest patterns). That's not "being purist". That's not requiring everyone to read the latest ECMAScript spec. That's a simple acknowledgement of the day-to-day reality of the job in a typical company.

by hajile 5y ago

brundolf 5y ago

> If you want to use any bundler or build tool created in the past 15 years, it's going to use closures for anything but the most recent projects. CommonJS which is still ubiquitous in NodeJS is literally closures. When it was created, it literally wrapped your file in a function that passed in some variables like global or import then called eval on the module it had now created. These are all implementation details; they couldn't matter less to most application developers. I've been writing JS for a decade and while I roughly knew that bundlers did something like this, I've never once had to deal with it directly. > If someone doesn't know how the module pattern works, they are a junior JS dev and absolutely cannot move on with their career until they understand. This is extremely not true. Knowing how modules are implemented under the hood is a concern of people who work on bundlers, transpilers, etc. For regular devs, an airtight abstraction is presented and it never needs to be more than that. It's wildly wrong to suggest that a person can't be productive at more than a junior level without knowing how this particular sausage is made. > When you look into the people pushing for these features, you almost always find a Java or C# developer. There's not a mass push by JS devs to add these features. Hello. I'm a JS dev who hasn't written Java or C# in over six years, who wouldn't want to write either of them, and yet I think private class members are valuable enough to have them in the language. > even if you and your particular set of devs do not I'm talking about the average JS dev doing mainstream JS work, here. I argue that ES classes are useful and mostly devoid of footguns for most, realistic, usage in industry. Not just for myself or for one particular team. In all I think you're taking a fairly extreme purist stance, where people are disallowed from being productive with a given technology unless they have a deep understanding of how it works underneath. That deep understanding is great to have - it's part of what makes a good lead dev - but plenty of people out there are plenty effective working off of provided abstractions, and it's narrow-minded to dismiss that fact.

hajile 5y ago
Let's look at the most popular JS books over the past decade. * JS modules are in the seminal "Javascript: The Good Parts". * "Eloquent Javascript" has an entire chapter called "modules" and that has existed across all three versions * "Javascript: The Definitive Guide" also has a section on modules. * Javascript.info contains an entire section about modules. * "Exploring JS" contains a section on the module pattern. * "You Don't Know JS" has even more about it. I don't see how someone could know JS as a senior or even mid-level developer without having read at least one of these sources let alone the years-long barrage of blog articles. I can say with 100% certainty that you cannot write properly using any modern framework without understanding closures (of which modules are one of the easiest patterns). That's not "being purist". That's not requiring everyone to read the latest ECMAScript spec. That's a simple acknowledgement of the day-to-day reality of the job in a typical company.