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I am all for clean syntax but I feel like JS has already reached a nice middle ground between expressiveness (especially w/ map/reduce/filter) and readability.

I am all for clean syntax but I feel like JS has already reached a nice middle ground between expressiveness (especially w/ map/reduce/filter) and readability. I'd personally rather not have another syntax that everyone will have to learn unless we're already moving to a new language.

nonethewiser 1y ago
I agree but to steelman it, what about custom functions? I think just doing it naively is perfectly fine. Or if you want use some pipe utility. Or wrap the array, string, etc. with your own custom methods.
IshKebab 1y ago
I think JS's map/reduce/filter design is one of the worst ones out there actually - map has footguns with its extra arguments and everything gets converted to an array at the drop of a hat. Still, pipeline syntax probably won't help fix any of that.
- eyelidlessness 1y ago
  > everything gets converted to an array at the drop of a hat Can you name an example? IME the opposite is a more common complaint: needing to explicitly convert values to arrays from many common APIs which return eg iterables/iterators.
  - IshKebab 1y ago
    `map` returns an array and can only be called on an array.
    - eyelidlessness 1y ago
      Right, but I’m not clear on what gets converted to an array. Do you mean more or less what I said in my previous comment? That it requires you (your code, or calling code in general) to perform that conversion excessively?
      - recursive 1y ago
        People write a lot of stuff like [...iterable].map(fn). They do it so much it's as if they do it each time a hat drops.
        eyelidlessness 1y ago
        Thank you for clarifying. (I think?) I think what confused me is the passive language: "everything gets converted" sounds (to me) like the runtime or some aspect of language semantics is converting everything, rather than developers. Whereas this is the same complaint I mentioned.
      - Timwi 1y ago
        One gripe I have is that the result of map/filter is always an array. As a result, doing `foo.map(...).filter(...).slice(0, 3)` will run the map and the filter on the entire array even if it has hundreds of entries and I only need the first 10 to find the 3 that match the filter.
- thdhhghgbhy 1y ago
  I always thought JS map filter reduce felt quite nice, especially playing around with data in the REPL. Java maps with all the conversions back and forth to streams are clumsy.
  - Timwi 1y ago
    Well in JS you have to convert to arrays instead. You can't do `document.querySelectorAll(...).map(...)`.
    - thdhhghgbhy 1y ago
      That's the DOM API, it's not part of the language! They had reasons for querySelectorAll not returning an array.

nonethewiser 1y ago

I agree but to steelman it, what about custom functions? I think just doing it naively is perfectly fine. Or if you want use some pipe utility. Or wrap the array, string, etc. with your own custom methods.

IshKebab 1y ago

I think JS's map/reduce/filter design is one of the worst ones out there actually - map has footguns with its extra arguments and everything gets converted to an array at the drop of a hat. Still, pipeline syntax probably won't help fix any of that.

eyelidlessness 1y ago
> everything gets converted to an array at the drop of a hat Can you name an example? IME the opposite is a more common complaint: needing to explicitly convert values to arrays from many common APIs which return eg iterables/iterators.
- IshKebab 1y ago
  `map` returns an array and can only be called on an array.
  - eyelidlessness 1y ago
    Right, but I’m not clear on what gets converted to an array. Do you mean more or less what I said in my previous comment? That it requires you (your code, or calling code in general) to perform that conversion excessively?
    - recursive 1y ago
      People write a lot of stuff like [...iterable].map(fn). They do it so much it's as if they do it each time a hat drops.
      - eyelidlessness 1y ago
        Thank you for clarifying. (I think?) I think what confused me is the passive language: "everything gets converted" sounds (to me) like the runtime or some aspect of language semantics is converting everything, rather than developers. Whereas this is the same complaint I mentioned.
    - Timwi 1y ago
      One gripe I have is that the result of map/filter is always an array. As a result, doing `foo.map(...).filter(...).slice(0, 3)` will run the map and the filter on the entire array even if it has hundreds of entries and I only need the first 10 to find the 3 that match the filter.
thdhhghgbhy 1y ago
I always thought JS map filter reduce felt quite nice, especially playing around with data in the REPL. Java maps with all the conversions back and forth to streams are clumsy.
- Timwi 1y ago
  Well in JS you have to convert to arrays instead. You can't do `document.querySelectorAll(...).map(...)`.
  - thdhhghgbhy 1y ago
    That's the DOM API, it's not part of the language! They had reasons for querySelectorAll not returning an array.