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How true hackers write JavaScript

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: How true hackers write JavaScript

#281

Post by masswerk »

iamleppert wrote: post #259

But where is Webpack??? Why aren't they using ES7 decorators and lambda syntax? Each one of those functions should be broken out into its own separate source file and they should be using classes, not functions. For the love of god, how do they trust this code will do the right thing without the obligatory type safety of a shoe-horned type system? And what is with this code returning false for everything? Everyone kn…

Also, there's an inexcusable lack of modal popups and dialogs on this site! They simply do not care about users! :-)

Re: How true hackers write JavaScript

#282

Post by snaky »

JoeCortopassi wrote: post #216

Everything has a context. If your site has: - minimal functionality - rarely if ever changes - is maintained by a very small group (Hacker News) ...then something like the example linked is perfect. Most web app developers don't live in this world. The more common situation is: - large and/or transient teams - large quantity of inter-dependent features - constant changes ...which means that the thing you need to opti…

> Most web app developers don't live in this world

Really? Most Javascript developers live in the world of trillion-dollar startups serving billions of people? That's why they need Kubernetes, React, and 2000 nodejs modules to show a couple of confirmation dialogs on the SOHO website they are working on.

Re: How true hackers write JavaScript

#283

Post by dave333 »

adamjc wrote: post #15

Either run it through a minifier or have the whole thing unminified, these single lined functions look horrific, and are saving characters for the sake of it. Terrible naming, e.g. 'vis' -> reading the function it means toggle visibility, so it should be called 'toggleVisibility', you shouldn't have to read what the function is doing to understand what it will do. You ever get a bug in your code, It's not fun to look…

I couldn't disagree more with your first sentence - being able to see all those functions in the first page of the code above the fold is what makes this 10 times easier to understand than any React or Angular component I have ever seen. In fact if a function doesn't fit on one line, it should be refactored into simpler functions until it does. Oh for a full UI framework like this made of single line functions - One Line Framework. However I am biased having used asm in the 70s, C in the 80s, java in the (late) 90s, and javascript in the naughties and teens.

Re: How true hackers write JavaScript

#284

Post by dave333 »

dave333 wrote: post #283
adamjc wrote: post #15

Either run it through a minifier or have the whole thing unminified, these single lined functions look horrific, and are saving characters for the sake of it. Terrible naming, e.g. 'vis' -> reading the function it means toggle visibility, so it should be called 'toggleVisibility', you shouldn't have to read what the function is doing to understand what it will do. You ever get a bug in your code, It's not fun to look…

I couldn't disagree more with your first sentence - being able to see all those functions in the first page of the code above the fold is what makes this 10 times easier to understand than any React or Angular component I have ever seen. In fact if a function doesn't fit on one line, it should be refactored into simpler functions until it does. Oh for a full UI framework like this made of single line functions - One…

Official name of the one line per function framework is FOOL - Functions on one line.

Re: How true hackers write JavaScript

#285

Post by dave333 »

iamleppert wrote: post #259

But where is Webpack??? Why aren't they using ES7 decorators and lambda syntax? Each one of those functions should be broken out into its own separate source file and they should be using classes, not functions. For the love of god, how do they trust this code will do the right thing without the obligatory type safety of a shoe-horned type system? And what is with this code returning false for everything? Everyone kn…

I see no smiley but I assume the tongue is firmly in the cheek, no?

Re: How true hackers write JavaScript

#286

Post by ibejoeb »

olavk wrote: post #116

There are some polarized opinions in this thread. Someone wrote That might be one of the most readable pieces of code that I've ever read. Apparently it improves readability immensely to rename 'forEach' to 'aeach'. To be honest the code is not very readable, but it is very simple and self contained. It would be very easy to dive into to fix a bug because there are no external dependencies or frameworks you have to u…

I did a lot of work on HNES for performance, and most of it was assigning meaning to HN's markup. I don't know if it's intentionally opaque or what, but this is just the way it is. The javascript and the html are bound together.

It's terse and effective, I suppose, but it was really interesting measuring pixels to judge comment nesting.

The JS itself is fine. It's the markup that's a mess.

Re: How true hackers write JavaScript

#287

Post by dvlsg »

krapp wrote: post #139
xigma wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It costs almost nothing more to write "event" instead of "ev" or "removeElement" instead of "remEl", but it makes the code much more readable. No, it doesn't. Unless you're an absolute beginner, it takes you a couple of seconds to realize that in this codebase, "ev" (or "evt" or even "e") means "event". The same goes for "remEl". If that's consistent, then it's not a big deal at all. Having less characters makes co…

>Having less characters makes code more readable (or rather "scannable") as well, it's just another tradeoff. Only to a point, otherwise minified js would be more legible than plain source. It takes "a couple of seconds" to scan the codebase and find out what el or ev refer to, but it would take zero seconds if they were just called "event" or "element."[0] There's no gain in readability from shaving off one or two c…

You are allowed to use both event and element, as they aren't strictly reserved keywords.

I think it's generally frowned upon, though. For example, I believe "event" is defined as a global in browsers (on window, perhaps?), so you run the risk of shadowed variables and accidentally referring to the wrong thing.

Re: How true hackers write JavaScript

#288

Post by rs86 »

lucisferre wrote: post #244

I'm not sure if this was linked fatously, but this is actually pretty good JS. - All functions - The functions are simple and decomposed into smaller functions - No usages of "this" (except one necessary one in an event handler) - No ham fisted attempts at doing OOP with JS Only complaints really are naming and code style is overly compact which would potentially make it harder to understand, but in this context I th…

JS is OOP, although does not have classes. It has prototypes

Re: How true hackers write JavaScript

#289

Post by h1d »

Jaruzel wrote: post #98

I don't understand why people are dissing this. It does what it's designed to do, and fills a specific need for one website. It's not there as a teaching aid, nor is it meant to be shared for other people to use elsewhere. Not everything has to be gold-standard code full of perfect variable names, extensive comments and good whitespacing. If you have a day job that isn't primarily writing code, and/or you are likely…

> who cares

You will.

> As long as the code works, anything else is just gravy.

These attitudes are really making some projects collapse like hell. If you agree to it, you need to stop writing code unless it's just for you.

> I'm sure you'd find less than stellar code everywhere

If this makes you feel proud of writing shit code, you need to stop as well.

Re: How true hackers write JavaScript

#290

Post by [deleted] »

iamleppert wrote: post #259

But where is Webpack??? Why aren't they using ES7 decorators and lambda syntax? Each one of those functions should be broken out into its own separate source file and they should be using classes, not functions. For the love of god, how do they trust this code will do the right thing without the obligatory type safety of a shoe-horned type system? And what is with this code returning false for everything? Everyone kn…

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