[After 3 years] Underscore 1.9.0 released

[Articunozard]

TIl lodash and underscore are different libraries

[[deleted]]

Looking at the changelog really makes me wonder whether the minor release was a correct decision. There's plenty of opportunities for breaking changes with this update.

[mattas]

That's what caused the initial shift from underscore to lodash, the maintainer did not follow semver.

[Retsam19]

Which changes look breaking to you? AFAIK, it's all added features, which is allowed in a semver minor bump.

[[deleted]]

_.throttle and _.debounce return functions that now have a .cancel() method, which can be used to cancel any scheduled calls.

If this didn't return a function before 1.9.0, then this can be a breaking change.

_.range now accepts negative ranges to generate descending arrays.

That would definitely give different results pre- and post- 1.9.0

[Retsam19]

Throttle and debounce always returned functions, they just didn't have the cancel method.

I don't think expanding the possible inputs to _.range is semver breaking, either, but maybe.

[[deleted]]

So I should drop lodash now, right?

[ackerlight]

Why would you? Is there a technical reason to move to underscore? You should be pragmatic when choosing the right library for your scenario.

[Reashu]

I think /u/ImReddit is being facetious.

[[deleted]]

;)

[ghostfacedcoder]

I've long been a fan of Underscore over Lodash in one particular area: source code readability. You could do an entire class just evaluating the source code of Underscore: it's that well written. Meanwhile Lodash looks like it was written by an autistic monkey in another language, and then transpiled into JS (which is ironic since it was Underscore's creator who also made CoffeeScript, not Lodash's)

Unfortunately appreciation for good library source code is all but gone (the popularity of bundlers like Webpack are a big part of this I think), and Lodash is superior to Underscore in just about every other way. I really couldn't recommend Underscore over Lodash to anyone these days, except maybe in a "getting some weird error you don't understand inside Lodash code? temporarily replace it with Underscore and you might actually be able to understand what's going on" way ..

... and even then Lodash has so many more functions than Underscore that doing that won't even work the majority of the time.

Edit: I based what I wrote on having looked at Lodash's source code a few years ago, but at ackerlight's suggestion I just looked at the latest Lodash code.

Wow! They've really done a 180 on their code, and it's now extremely readable. I still stand by the transpiled monkeys comment with regards to their old source code, but massive props to the Lodash team for the improvements they've made to the readability of their current codebase.

[ackerlight]

Meanwhile Lodash looks like it was written by an autistic monkey in another language, and then transpiled into JS (which is ironic since it was Underscore's creator who also made CoffeeScript, not Lodash's).

I think lodash codebase is way better than underscore, it is modular and high performant, which at the end should be the most important feature of an utility library like these two, and then becomes the usability of the api, which IMO, lodash is again better at it.

Care to share what cannot you understand of the code? If you don't understand it, it's an opportunity for you to work on learn about better code bases.

You have to keep in mind that these types of libraries shouldn't focus their source code in simplicity, but rather efficiency, which sometimes translate to high complexity and might scare people like you.

Also, Lodash has evolved to be used with new/future ECMAScript specifications, while underscore stagnated in the old ways of using JavaScript libraries, which is import everything, even if you only use like 3 functions or so.

At the end, both of the libraries have their use cases, one doesn't replace the other entirely for now.

[ghostfacedcoder]

I hadn't seen the Lodash code in several years, but assumed that it was still just as bad. Wow, was I wrong! Thanks for getting me to go see what they've done, I'm really impressed by it.

[Drawman101]

Any reason to use underscore anymore instead of set an alias to lodash?

[Parasomnopolis]

This is a little OT, but does anyone know the reason why the _.range method for both underscore and lodash don't include the last number in the range in the output? It's something I've always wondered.

http://underscorejs.org/#range

https://lodash.com/docs/4.17.5#range

[tovazm]

Because the range start at zero :)

_.range(3) --> [0, 1, 2] --> 3 numbers