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It honestly blows my mind that there is backlash against ES6. The new features solve so many pain points I've experienced in MVC and library development: - rid

• z3t4 12y ago
  I've never read any programming books or taken any classes, I've just read a lot of code written by others and also written some myself. Here's my advice after 15 years of reading both brilliant and shitty JS code: a) Don't use anonymous functions ... You want your program to be easy to understand, so come up with a name for the function and put it as a sub-function at the bottom of the current function. b) I love the Nodejs implementation of modules and I would say it's the main reason behind Nodejs success. But it doesn't make sense in the HTTP world. Imagine having to download 100 dependency files each time you visit a webpage. c) I have a keyboard macro for " + + ". So if you don't save an extra keystroke, what's the deal? It might be useful if you have nasty habits like building HTML or SQL by concatenating strings though. (don't do that). d) Just declare your variables at the top of the function and stop worrying about scope, (while listening to Bobby McFerrin.) e) I can somewhat agree here. But where it's really needed you should make a copy or clone function. And if it's not really needed you shouldn't. Makes you write less complicated code because of laziness. f) Give it a name! function Car() {var car = this;} Or if you don't want people to understand your code: var that = this; g) You are probably trying to make your function do too much! If you Do want to have one function to rule them all, pass an object to it. h) It's possible to make async code intuitive. Stop using anonymous functions will help a lot! But it's not That easy. Promises is just another (ineffective; it just threats the symptoms) paradigm to reason with async code. i) We don't need classes. The prototype already work great. It might be hard to learn but once you understand it's brilliant! (I don't blame you if you never will, it's hard to learn an old dog to sit). I encourage you to use the paradigms you believe in, and also to try different solutions, and think outside the box. But don't force certain paradigms by changing the language itself. One exception being Node.js where you are forced into making modules. (but some people are stubborn and use Browserify to circumvent it).
  • acjohnson55 12y ago
    I'm aware there are workarounds for all of these things, but they all result in a ridiculous amount of boilerplate and syntactic noise. To me, naming a simple function that's an argument to, say, `.map(...)` and putting it at the bottom of a function is pretty heavyweight. Many of your suggestions are just optimizing for the current state of JS instead of thinking about how to best leverage the many brilliant syntactic advances from throughout the industry. I guess there's no point in arguing. Change is coming, and people can keep writing super verbose JS if they like; I'll be writing code that more directly reflects the actual important logic.
    • z3t4 12y ago
      I can't come up with a real world use for the .map function, but then I only use Arrays when I do evil things like writing optimized code. If I however would end up in a situation where I wanted to do: var odds = evens.map(v => v + 1); I would write this instead: var odds = increment(evens, n); But it's never as simple as this, evens would probably be some sort of async object and you probably want to call another function once the "incrementation" has completed. The only thing => does is to make the syntax more complex (and ugly) by saving a few keystrokes. And even worse, it's a treatment for a symptom from anonymous functions, that you shouldn't even use in the first place. And will be used everywhere, because we are lazy. But the time saved, will have to be used for mind juggling, to figure out what goes where in the syntax. That said, I don't think all new stuff is useless. For example Object.defineProperty (ES5) that actually Adds to the language, and makes it possible to do things you couldn't do before. Like defining a set function.
      • jarcane 12y ago
        That is a loaded example that deliberately leaves out the implementation details to disguise the productivity gains. If you really can't see the productivity difference between writing this: const vals = ['#hp','#mp','#gp'].map(x => $(x).val()); And this: var elems = ['#hp','#mp','#gp']; var getVal = function (x) { return $(x).val() }; var mtVals = []; for (var x = 0; x < elems.length; x++) { mtVals.push(getVal(elems[x])); } ... then maybe you should actually go read some of those programming books you're so dismissive of.