Good to know that depending on the author of an article, some stories don't get flagged and disappear from the front page of hacker news.
Best Practices Exist For A Reason
51–60 of 105 posts
Re: Best Practices Exist For A Reason
#52The main problem with appealing to "best practices" is this: One man's best practice is another man's anti-pattern. Between semicolon-free folks and JavaScript traditionalists, who gets to play the role of the expert? If Node.js is popular, does that mean that Isaac's comma-first style is "correct"? ( https://gist.github.com/357981 ) In the absence of a quantitative engineering method with which to evaluate either ap…
The root problem is that we still don't know how to disagree when two sides look at the same set of data and believe two different things. We allow ourselves to descend into tribalism and assume the worst of each other. If you look at the language Tom objects to the most, it's language Isaac uses that promotes this tribal attitude that the other side doesn't have your best interests at heart, and questions their moti…
Didn't the Greeks crack it with the Trivium? http://www.triviumeducation.com/
Re: Best Practices Exist For A Reason
#53Many best practices work well because they mean you don't ever have to think about uninteresting problems (like ASI) ever again. I know the rules of ASI but I honestly have never had to think about them because, I don't need to; I just put a semicolon at the end of my lines.
If you ever have to do network and systems administrations you will come across loads of best practices because needing to memorize every last rule and edge case of all the software on your systems would be truly maddening.
That said, it is always good to know the why behind best practices and not follow them blindly.
Re: Best Practices Exist For A Reason
#54The main problem with appealing to "best practices" is this: One man's best practice is another man's anti-pattern. Between semicolon-free folks and JavaScript traditionalists, who gets to play the role of the expert? If Node.js is popular, does that mean that Isaac's comma-first style is "correct"? ( https://gist.github.com/357981 ) In the absence of a quantitative engineering method with which to evaluate either ap…
"Between semicolon-free folks and JavaScript traditionalists, who gets to play the role of the expert?"
You're framing this as a disagreement between equals. It is not. There are degrees of expertise. (Total lines of production code * amount of usage) is a reasonable approximation, and those who rank highest on this scale are overwhelmingly in favor of requiring semicolons.
If Carmack and Torvalds were in agreement on a C best practice while Odesker^W^W^W^W^W^W^W Topcoder user #12571 said to do something else, I wouldn't go with the latter.
Google, responsible for a JS engine, multiple compilers that target JS, and what is likely to be the single largest JS codebase of any company: http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/javascript...
Brendan Eich: "The moral of this story: ASI is (formally speaking) a syntactic error correction procedure."
Or you can go with the Node.js guys.
Re: Best Practices Exist For A Reason
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
To play at devil's advocate, please don't. Otherwise you should have written your comment like this: To me , consistency is important . All of my codebase is traditional comma postfix , so I'll keep using that ; however , maybe with some new projects I'll try on the comma prefix [...] ... using typography in a typographically sensible way is far more important to readability than an arbitrary "consistency" of punctat…
Why does nobody ever mention the obvious solution? Separate var statements. They're always correct, they copy without any editing, and the "var"s line up to show that it's a block of assignments the same as commas or whitespace.
Separate vars is what I prefer to do, but JSLint actually recommends that you change multiple var statements to a single var with variables separated by commas (and with a semicolon at the end of course!). (And also all var declarations at the top of the function...).
Re: Best Practices Exist For A Reason
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
With the comma first style, that bug would never have been introduced. Neat, huh? If you run any syntax checking or minification tools, this will be immediately obvious. If you test your site in IE at all, this will be immediately obvious. If you record JS errors on your site, this will soon be obvious. If you record any kind of usage statistic, this will eventually be obvious. Take it from someone who has experiment…
Prevention > Detection by Developer > Detection by Tester > Detection by Customer. Having mechanisms in place to catch programmer errors is no excuse for adopting practices that make programmer errors more likely.
Two of the tools that I mentioned are in the "prevention" category: syntax checkers and minifiers. The full enumeration is just a sanity check. If coding style is the only thing keeping your product from being broken, you're doing something else quite wrong.
Re: Best Practices Exist For A Reason
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
With a decent language that allows trailing commas (eg. everything other than JS or SQL), it would never have been a problem in the first place.
Actually JS does allow trailing commas. Read the spec. It is an IE bug that causes it to break. One of the many ways they do not follow the spec.
It's the other way around. It was illegal in ECMAScript 3, which is what IE 8 and below (at the very least) implement:
ObjectLiteral :
{ }
{ PropertyNameAndValueList }
ObjectLiteral :
{ }
{ PropertyNameAndValueList }
{ PropertyNameAndValueList , }
Re: Best Practices Exist For A Reason
#58The main problem with appealing to "best practices" is this: One man's best practice is another man's anti-pattern. Between semicolon-free folks and JavaScript traditionalists, who gets to play the role of the expert? If Node.js is popular, does that mean that Isaac's comma-first style is "correct"? ( https://gist.github.com/357981 ) In the absence of a quantitative engineering method with which to evaluate either ap…
"Between semicolon-free folks and JavaScript traditionalists, who gets to play the role of the expert?" You're framing this as a disagreement between equals. It is not. There are degrees of expertise. (Total lines of production code * amount of usage) is a reasonable approximation, and those who rank highest on this scale are overwhelmingly in favor of requiring semicolons. If Carmack and Torvalds were in agreement o…
You can think about the effect of coding style instead of letting the experts think for you.
If you are doing a Topcoder round, then the random Topcoder user's advice is probably better than Carmack's. Carmack or Torvalds would probably tell you to use a variable name that gives a lot of information about its purpose, so that other people will find it easier to read your code. The Topcoder user might tell you to use a cryptic abbreviation that helps you remember a variable's purpose but clues little to the outside reader, since Topcoder users are penalized for allowing others to find their bugs. When implementing an algorithm, Carmack or Torvalds would code it as part of an extensible system with an API so that it can be used for many purposes. The Topcoder user might code it with no potential for reuse, but would do it in the way easiest to code quickly without making a mistake.
Re: Best Practices Exist For A Reason
#59The main problem with appealing to "best practices" is this: One man's best practice is another man's anti-pattern. Between semicolon-free folks and JavaScript traditionalists, who gets to play the role of the expert? If Node.js is popular, does that mean that Isaac's comma-first style is "correct"? ( https://gist.github.com/357981 ) In the absence of a quantitative engineering method with which to evaluate either ap…
"Between semicolon-free folks and JavaScript traditionalists, who gets to play the role of the expert?" You're framing this as a disagreement between equals. It is not. There are degrees of expertise. (Total lines of production code * amount of usage) is a reasonable approximation, and those who rank highest on this scale are overwhelmingly in favor of requiring semicolons. If Carmack and Torvalds were in agreement o…
You can think about the effect of coding style instead of following the experts like gospel.
If you are doing a Topcoder round, then the random Topcoder user's advice is probably better than Carmack's. Carmack or Torvalds would probably tell you to use a variable name that gives a lot of information about its purpose, so that other people will find it easier to read your code. The Topcoder user might tell you to use a cryptic abbreviation that helps you remember a variable's purpose but clues little to the outside reader, since Topcoder users are penalized for allowing others to find their bugs. When implementing an algorithm, Carmack or Torvalds would code it as part of an extensible system with an API so that it can be used for many purposes. The Topcoder user might code it with no potential for reuse, but would do it in the way easiest to code quickly without making a mistake.
Re: Best Practices Exist For A Reason
#60Very well written post.
However, I found it to be of little value. When fully reading Isaac's post (http://blog.izs.me/post/2353458699/an-open-letter-to-javascr...), it appears to not diverge much from what you've written.
I consider myself a beginner in Javascript and did not find Isaac's post the least condescending. I actually learned a few things and am very glad he took the time to explain how things work. Because honestly, I won't read the ECMAScript spec unless I need to.
I'm actually one of the people who never use semi-colons to terminate statements. That's for personal projects. Where I work, we (as a team) decided to use them. And that's fine, but I prefer not to use them.