21–30 of 123 posts
Not ES directly, but you know what I need on an almost daily basis? A JSON date type. It’s obnoxious to have to pass a string back and forth and parse it on either end between server and browser.
Really liking these new developments! JavaScript is not the horrible language it used to be anymore (in my very subjective opinion). When I started writing JavaScript in 2016 after a Python background I was frustrated every day... Then after some time and learning about which dark corners to avoid, which tools to use, etc. it became quite an enjoyable experience. Nowadays I mostly use a mix of JavaScript and TypeScri…
New methods with simple behaviour don't really make the language more complex through.
> And that's great, but that's a new function, and maybe 'replace(...)' should have had this behavior from the start.
As you note it kinda does, just in a weird roundabout manner.
One issue with javascript is also that it makes extending existing functions difficult, because extra arguments are just ignored by default, so you can't just add a `count=1` parameter to String.replace to override the regex flag as there could be code out there which already passes a third (currently ignored) parameter and would break.
Not ES directly, but you know what I need on an almost daily basis? A JSON date type. It’s obnoxious to have to pass a string back and forth and parse it on either end between server and browser.
I was going to ask a variant of that question: what is the status of BigInt and when might it clear TC39 approval? In most languages a Date object is just a BigInt with Unix time() making this somewhat obvious. BigInt will allow not only proper Date implementation but Currency and Real types, and many more things.
I don’t mean to hate on ECMAScript, but is anyone else slightly surprised these features weren’t in earlier? Like I wonder how many bugs were introduced because the developer didn’t realize Array.sort() was unstable.
Another sort() quirk that catches people out is not realising it uses string comparison by default [1,2,10].sort() = [1,10,2]
Not ES directly, but you know what I need on an almost daily basis? A JSON date type. It’s obnoxious to have to pass a string back and forth and parse it on either end between server and browser.
I was going to ask a variant of that question: what is the status of BigInt and when might it clear TC39 approval? In most languages a Date object is just a BigInt with Unix time() making this somewhat obvious. BigInt will allow not only proper Date implementation but Currency and Real types, and many more things.
If you mean a 64-bit integer type (which, to be fair, is 11 bits larger than what JavaScript supports), then that's still not enough. As long as you want nanosecond-level granularity, and range beyond the current decade for your timestamps, you'll need more than 8 bytes to represent them in code.
Not ES directly, but you know what I need on an almost daily basis? A JSON date type. It’s obnoxious to have to pass a string back and forth and parse it on either end between server and browser.
There's plenty of good reasons one doesn't exist. JSON is not JS-specific. It is a standard interchange format used by thousands of languages, many of which have very different date implementations. If you did have a JSON date, how would you decide what it was? Would it be a timestamp, or a civil date-time? Would it have timezones? Offsets? Locations? Would there be a database along with it required to understand it…
You could make the same argument with numbers - there's no reason you couldn't just pass strings containing the number - but there's advantages to being able to distinguish between a string and a number when the schema is unknown.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another sort() quirk that catches people out is not realising it uses string comparison by default [1,2,10].sort() = [1,10,2]
Wow, who came up with that idea? And people say Haskell is hard to learn...
When neither the function nor the parameters have hard types, you have to create heuristics. There could be a test for numbers there, but it would also be surprising because at the older days people expected "10" and 10 to behave the same.
Really liking these new developments! JavaScript is not the horrible language it used to be anymore (in my very subjective opinion). When I started writing JavaScript in 2016 after a Python background I was frustrated every day... Then after some time and learning about which dark corners to avoid, which tools to use, etc. it became quite an enjoyable experience. Nowadays I mostly use a mix of JavaScript and TypeScri…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another sort() quirk that catches people out is not realising it uses string comparison by default [1,2,10].sort() = [1,10,2]
It’s the curse of the optional arguments. Same thing with parsing numbers where the second argument magically specifies the base. If the comparison function argument was mandatory in sort() this wouldn’t be a problem.
I wonder what kind of shenanigans you could do with Function.toString(). It'd be even better if they had Function.toAST().
If I remember correctly, AngularJS 1.x would use it for dependency injection.
I don't follow what it would use function strings for determining missing - presumably - polyfills that you couldn't do in better ways.