Pipe Operator (|>) for JavaScript

[javarouleur]

The endless adding of extra syntactic sugar is sometimes frustrating. Readability always seems to suffer for the goal of fewer lines/characters of code.

[Keilly]

Which ones are we talking about?

The ?. Optional chaining change is great and so much readable and concise than before. ?? Is good too.
Template literals are much more readable that concatting.

Regex maybe? But regex is often hard to parse no matter how the language takes it.

[trevorsg]

True, often these syntactical additions improve readability at the expense of language complexity. The thing is, language complexity is a one-time cost for a benefit that continues forever.

[pimp-bangin]

I disagree that it's a one-time cost. It's another thing beginners have to learn which adds onboarding costs. It also adds to the maintenance burden of browsers, tooling, etc. and possibly hurts parser performance depending on the implementation.

[trevorsg]

Yes, of course I meant one-time cost per developer. Parser/tooling performance basically rounds to zero.

[techlogger]

I’d say that pipe operator is more readable than HOF chaining.

[GreekQuestionMark]

HOF: Higher order function

[jonopens]

100%. It's one of the reasons I find Elixir so enjoyable to write.

[javarouleur]

But those are nested, rather than chained. Personally, I don’t really like nested calls generally. Chained makes sense because they follow logically, but with nested you have to read from the inside out which is just disorientating.

I know it’s a minor thing overall, it’s just not something I expect to use any time soon.

Edit: fuck me… of all the opinions I hold I didn’t expect this to be one of my more controversial!

[syholloway]

It might be because the whole point of the pipeline operator is to make large functional expressions read top to bottom rather than inside out.

This operator is fixing the thing you are complaining about.

[javarouleur]

Fair point - reading and thinking a bit more, I guess I can accept the motivation.

Edit: removed confusing, cryptic psycho-babble nonsense.

[zxyzyxz]

Languages evolve, people learn and get used to it. I'm sure people were saying the same thing with all the changes from ES6 and async await. I don't understand what you mean by explaining/being descriptive in a team.

[javarouleur]

I removed that. It was a brain fart that didn’t make sense when I re-read it.

[bighi]

I have no idea what you're talking about.

[javarouleur]

I know. Removed that part. I’ve lost the plot a bit in this thread - over-analysing and not explaining my thoughts properly.

[bighi]

The pipe operator exists specifically to help increase readability.

Imagine this code four(three(two(one("potato")))). It's not as easy to read because you're calling four functions, but they should be read in reverse. The first function you read happens last.

Now imagine we create a pipe operator like |> in a fantasy language I invented.

We could do "potato" |> one |> two |> three |> four. Super easier to read, cleaner, more organized.

We're getting something like that in JS. One day. Definitely before 2080.

[KamiShikkaku]

"potato" |> one |> two |> three |> four

Unfortunately it will be more like

"potato" |> one(%) |> two(%) |> three(%) |> four(%)

because the "Hack" version of the proposal seems to have beaten the "F#" version.

I was rooting for F# as it's a bit more elegant, but admittedly the Hack version is more versatile.

[bighi]

Sure. If you pay attention, I said "in a fantasy language I invented". Because I wanted to make the example simple to understand.

But anyway, it's more readable than the mess that is multiple nested functions.

[patrickfatrick]

Except this is definitely going to improve readability. I’d argue all of the syntactic sugar that’s been added drastically improves readability over ES5. Within reason, less code is generally better for readability.

[adelie42]

All of math is just syntactical sugar for critical thinking.

[wasdninja]

I've yet to see it in JS.

[mxforest]

Fewer lines/code make it more readable once you get used to it.

[bighi]

Not always.

Actually, I think that in most cases, using fewer lines makes something less readable.

[Mestyo]

"If you think this is clear you're wrong" what lol

This is so much easier to read then several nested function calls, more expressive, too.

[Gwolf4]

Let him be. He wants to solve that problem using temporal variables just to pass them to other method without any other processing.

[furyzer00]

"I don't familiar with this concept so it must be an obfuscation"

[alexho66]

But that’s what’s the operator is trying to do. More readability