3 ms·

> ~~‘s flooring capabilities make it a better alternative to Math.floor if you know you’re dealing with positives — it’s faster and takes up less characters. G

> ~~‘s flooring capabilities make it a better alternative to Math.floor if you know you’re dealing with positives — it’s faster and takes up less characters. Good lord. This takes me back to 2012 when all the cool kids were putting bangs before functions so that you didn’t have to use semicolons anywhere. I’ve basically decided as a career goal that I’ll never write JavaScript for money again, so it’s no skin off my nose, but why does the JavaScript world constantly go through these bizarre contortions of misusing syntax for vague “performance” gains at the expense of communicating intent?

bruce343434 3y ago
I think the post makes a good argument in favor of it. It's shorter, meaning it's cleaner, less visual noise. You just have to learn what it does. That's part of the job. That's what it means to be a skilled developer. It's absolutely not hard to remember that this is a "round to zero, or make it zero if it's something weird", and that functionality seems very useful.
- eloisius 3y ago
  It's not "less noise" just because it's shorter. Code golf is extremely hard to read exactly because it's so terse. If Math.ceil is making your code hard to read, there's probably something else going on. Being a good coder means elegantly expressing intent with code, not memorizing hacks. As for performance, if misusing an operator like this is actually faster, then that means there should be an easy patch to V8 that would make it faster without miscommunicating intent. Regardless, just like readability, if Math.ceil even registered as anything in a performance profile you must be doing something very weird. Like implementing Torch in JavaScript weird.
  - bruce343434 3y ago
    It's just a matter of internalizing the "intent" of ~~. And then suddenly the code is "clean" again. Just like `!!` is a socially acceptable way of casting to bool.
lakpan 3y ago
Nothing compared to , commas , first ;

bruce343434 3y ago

I think the post makes a good argument in favor of it. It's shorter, meaning it's cleaner, less visual noise. You just have to learn what it does. That's part of the job. That's what it means to be a skilled developer. It's absolutely not hard to remember that this is a "round to zero, or make it zero if it's something weird", and that functionality seems very useful.

eloisius 3y ago
It's not "less noise" just because it's shorter. Code golf is extremely hard to read exactly because it's so terse. If Math.ceil is making your code hard to read, there's probably something else going on. Being a good coder means elegantly expressing intent with code, not memorizing hacks. As for performance, if misusing an operator like this is actually faster, then that means there should be an easy patch to V8 that would make it faster without miscommunicating intent. Regardless, just like readability, if Math.ceil even registered as anything in a performance profile you must be doing something very weird. Like implementing Torch in JavaScript weird.
- bruce343434 3y ago
  It's just a matter of internalizing the "intent" of ~~. And then suddenly the code is "clean" again. Just like `!!` is a socially acceptable way of casting to bool.

lakpan 3y ago

Nothing compared to , commas , first ;