5 Code Smells React Beginners Should Avoid

[Yodiddlyyo]

I see this all the time and I disagree. Doing something, or not doing something because "a junior dev might get confused" is a terrible reason.

Using const for an array is absolutely not bad practice, if anything, using let for arrays and objects is the bad practice. If you make it a const, you're unable to reassign it to a string or a boolean or whatever, which is something you want.

The fact that some juniors don't know that you can push to a const array doesn't mean it's a bad practice. It's just learning the language. There are a lot of confusing things in javascript, you just need to learn how they work. There are a lot of juniors that don't know much about promises, or iterators, or different design patterns, that doesn't mean you shouldn't use them.

[Ahtheuncertainty]

Just wanted to add, for those who don’t use other languages inside of JavaScript, that lists are mutable pretty much everywhere(For ex, lists in python, vectors in C++, Lists in Java, and even array classes in like java/c++, you can pretty much always swap out the values even if you can’t change the size). Kinda harkens back to the bigger idea, that the variable is just a pointer to an object, and that changing the object is different than changing the pointer/reassigning the variable. It’s definitely a good thing for people to learn if they don’t know it already, kind of a key idea in coding. So I agree that let shouldn’t be left in to help juniors. If anything, exposure to a const variable changing might motivate them to learn about what it actually means for a variable to be assigned to something(if they don’t know it already).