The State of JavaScript – Survey results

Post by Aldo_MX » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 5:49 PM UTC

Roboprog wrote: post #331

SiVal wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a little bit for you. Most people prefer the semantics of `let` to `var` for variable declarations in JavaScript. It's how JavaScript should have been designed from the start. It has been officially standard for a year or two and became available in some browsers even earlier. I want to use `let` (and `const`) for everything and never use `var` again, but I couldn't even do that on my own PRIVATE website (for…

I get "const", but is "let" really that big a deal? Are your functions so deeply nested that you need block scope inside of if statements and for loops? (vs forEach callbacks or IIFE blocks or simply splitting complicated stuff into smaller functions) There is some cool stuff in ES6, but "let" is kind of a yawn, and "class" most definitely is NOT something I really needed. But I'm still running ES5 on IE11 at work, s…

  let element = document.getElementById('some-element');
  while (element) {
    // do something
    element = element.parentElement;
  }

Post by erikpukinskis » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 6:16 PM UTC

zachrose wrote: post #280

alasdair_ wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"everything that happens in your Ember app is deeply tangled in Ember internals which are very complex." and >"it's fundamentally at odds with what I would consider the Node Ethos, which is small packages that do one thing cleanly." You could substitute "Ember" with "Microsoft Windows" and "Node" with "UNIX" and be just as correct. I wonder how frequently this design/philosophy decision comes up.

I hear very distinct echos of Rich Hickey's talk, Simple Made Easy. In that talk, "easy" is defined as being nearby, familiar, or otherwise "at hand" to the person who is involved. This is different than "simple", which is presented as an orthogonal concept meaning roughly "one operation" not tangled or interleaved with neighboring concepts. This is a clear and useful way to think about simplicity in software (1). I…

Post by jack9 » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 10:58 PM UTC

Post by Roboprog » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 11:20 PM UTC

Aldo_MX wrote: post #341

Roboprog wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get "const", but is "let" really that big a deal? Are your functions so deeply nested that you need block scope inside of if statements and for loops? (vs forEach callbacks or IIFE blocks or simply splitting complicated stuff into smaller functions) There is some cool stuff in ES6, but "let" is kind of a yawn, and "class" most definitely is NOT something I really needed. But I'm still running ES5 on IE11 at work, s…

Sometimes you just need to do something the old way: let element = document.getElementById('some-element'); while (element) { // do something element = element.parentElement; } let doesn't get in the way with behavior such as hoisting, and the code will break if you redeclare a variable.

    var el
    for (
        el = document.getElement... ;
        el ;
        el = el.parentElement
    ) {
        // do something
    }

Post by davidjnelson » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 3:30 AM UTC

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #344

davidjnelson wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with what you're saying. You don't want to get stuck in a corner. That's smart and pragmatic. Perhaps an expert that mentors the rest of the team? I just don't see how we can do without software build tools. They are so common in almost every language/platform I've used.

> I just don't see how we can do without software build tools. They are so common in almost every language/platform I've used. All depends on your use case. Honestly if you're working on a web app you actually don't need any build tools if you really didn't want to. But ultimately I wasn't advocating for zero build tools. The way JavaScript works you can write your own scripts (I wrote my own, barely one page of code…