this and => and that
Or: how you can fall in love with the best of bad options
Realtalk: I prefer the standard function syntax to arrow function syntax. It’s more verbose, certainly, but it’s also more human readable.
has a bit more poetry to it than:
This is coming from someone who appreciates E.E. Cummings, so don’t think I’m against strange punctuation and breaking lines apart in questionable places. I’m not, I just think there’s something to be said for the additional clarity that the function()
syntax offers.
That said, as in poetry, the syntax mirrors the action here, and the way that the arrow function’s syntax is more ambiguous echoes one of the main benefits that the arrow syntax offers you as a programmer: it’s anonymity. A function declared using arrow syntax doesn’t accept a this value. That means #1 – if you’re declaring a function within a context, you don’t need to call/apply/bind an arrow function to that context as long as the function was declared in context (and in fact, you won’t be able to if you want to).
This allows us to bypass declaring a new variable in our JS objects to represent “this”.
This won’t work
Obviously this isn’t a great idea, because it won’t work.
Declaring variable to represent this
More realtalk Let’s be honest with ourselves. that
is useful, but it’s also the linguistic equivalent to “literally” meaning both “figuratively” and “literally”. It requires a lot of tracking to make sure that we’re doing what we intended to do. To other people, it may as well have not been said. Avoiding this convention is a good idea where possible.
Using an arrow function
Sometimes even if you dislike a tool, it can be useful.