Optional chaining is a game-changer for everybody how is working with Javascript. It is as essential as Fat Arrow Functions or 'let' and 'const'. L...
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YES! I've been super excited waiting for this in javascript since ruby added it in 2.3.
It's certainly a lot better than writing:
:)
Thanks for the pointer to the babel plugin!
Is there any issue in Ruby with people overusing this feature and it becoming unclear what is nullable and what isn't?
I think it can if you overdo it, yes (there are a few blogposts about that if you search for them) - but in general, for patterns like checking if a prop exists, etc, I think it's a good thing.
There might be an argument for: "if you need to do that regularly, then maybe you need a different abstraction or way of doing things"... but I haven't thought too much about that, so I'm not sure.
I would say that the objects you are getting are not well designed.
If you need to check that often that it will be a problem.
I mean you can overdo everything, adding 200 npm packages even if they just do small things would also be a bad pattern. In the end, it is in your fingertips to decide.
Right, yep - if you're constantly checking the same thing for null or not, then maybe you need to abstract that to give you a better framework/way to access it.
Like always thinking is the key here 😉
IMO it lends itself to patterns like:
Not only are you doing extra branching, but by having defaults at the usage site instead of defaults site you could have inconsistencies.
Instead, on construction of the
this
, you could haveand then access all the properties unconditionally.
(You could also only merge in properties that already exist in
defaultData
tree, and perform validation at this stage, creating a very predictablethis
)Exactly!
It is just way easier to write :)
No problem.
In general proposal usually, have babel plugins. It just sometimes hard to find them or you have to directly search for them :)
It's probably worth mentioning that TypeScript don't have support for this feature yet (AFAIK), so could lead to some IDE 'errors'.
There is also no plugin to add them into TS support syntax checking yet, so we have to live with the errors or disable TS checks.
They plan to add it in TS 3.7.0! 😁
Nice I really need to try TS at some point :)
Thanks for mentioning this!
I don't work with TS that often but I think at some point they will support it :)
does TS support babeljs? if yes maybe they can work together right now? 🤔
Neither do I but it's what drives the syntax support in Visual Studio Code :)
So, even when just working with JavaScript, you may still get errors in VSC - even though it will run absolutely fine. It can throw some red herrings for devs who aren't aware why, so just thought I'd mention it.
Not for what I'm talking about, no. Whether TS and Babel can work, when writing TS, is a question for someone that uses TS :)
I'm referring to the VSC built-in JS/TS validator. It can be disabled by updating the
settings.json
file to include"javascript.validate.enable": false
and/or"typescript.validate.enable": false
. If they are disabled ESLint can take over and show the appropriate errors.Ahh okay yeah, that's true!
VSC will show an error if you don't configure it!
I just got used to seeing the error 🤣
I'm pretty sure typescript has something like this ... I know because my last angular project came to a point where I used the ? in a way similar to this to disambiguate values extracted from defined types in the app. Nothing major (it was my first project) but I definitely remember finding usage of "?" as a means of testing type attributes without using a long if condition with explicit null checking. I'll have to confirm by looking at my project code.
Are you maybe referring to Ternary operators?
Interestingly enough today at work I opened up the project in question and was unable to find where I used the "?" in the typescript. I think it may have been in an html file using an ng directive but had to switch off to other work before I finalized my search.
You could be right...I'll confirm again tomorrow.
Why
Rather than
?
Good question!
Example time!
As you can see there is a difference in how they work.
The problem with
||
is that it will return the right value when the left value isfalsy
. The??
just checks fornull
orundefined
.Could also consider converting to a true/false value with:
@joshua I was literally going to say the same thing.
I fail to see the point/usefulness of the '??' operator
There are always alternatives if you can also write
Nobody is forcing anybody to use the
??
operator but I think it just fits nicely together with the?.
and makes the intent clear if the developer knows how both of them work.Probably that ?? only cares about undefined properties, not null or zero or empty string etc.
It's called nullish for a reason. Because for some reason, JS thought two nulls would be a good idea.
May be a long argument but it's not two nulls, it's a null (defined) and an undefined. They have usefully different meanings and usages. Saying it's two nulls is a bit like saying that zero and null are the same because they both mean "nothing".
I would have to agree with you, however in the wild most code I've seen misinterprets this and there is mixed usage of both all over the place..
And everybody is true here :)
I try to use
undefined
as much as I can instead ofnull
.But some frameworks want you to use
null
.No use until it is supported by major browsers
Why not just use babel.js?
You as a developer don't even see the difference?
One day you will just remove the babel.js plugin and that's it.
Oh didn't see the plugin
there is a link in the
Start using it today
section.babel-plugin-proposal-optional-cha...
yeah got it thanks!
No problem :)
We should really consider not to use it until it is available in browsers.
The polyfill is really ugly and verbose.
That's why I wrote this article
dev.to/slashgear_/optional-chainin...
I have a confession to make.
I really really dislike
lodash
andunderscore
.If you look at
babel
code,in general, it does not look good.
Besides that looking at the lodash code it is not much better ;)
But that's just my opinion, there is no right or wrong here!
Totally agree:)
Thanks, Iampewebdev for sharing this great article. And the great news I would like to share is, that you can actually use an online web dev tool which supports this feature. If anyone of you interested in trying out, check out this article or jump directly to code editor - jsitor.com/bIhQS-b4Y
Try Optional Chaining and Nullish Coalescing on JSitor, its live
Ashvin Kumar Suthar ・ Sep 21 ・ 2 min read
Nice!
I will try it out!
Thanks for the info :)
Thanks.
Your welcome 😀🙌
Yay finally JavaScript is getting inspiration from Kotlin!
Edit: After seeing a few comments looks like this is already in a few other languages
Kotlin is heavily inspired by C#. Which also influences TypeScript. I think the lesson is, C# does a lot right! I just wish there was a 1-to-1 implementation of LINQ in TypeScript 🥳
You can always create a C#/Node project and call it from JS :D
Yeah, some other languages also have this!
and finally JS also will have it :)
Sorry for the late reply. Also
Nullish coalescing operator
? Who makes these names? We should call it the elvis operatorUsually, they come from Math people 🤣🤣🤣
No doubt
This is probably the worst proposal ever. It will allow to write even shittier code in JS.
Rather than solving the problem by better code design, devs will use this crappy shit.
Okay, why is this crappy?
What do you mean with better code design?
Please explain a little bit more what you mean.
You are retrieving some data from API. Till you retrieve the data, you should have something like
data: null
, after you get data from API, you should have the whole object.API should always return you a predefined object structure, right? So once
data !== null
, you should be able to access all properties and deep properties instead of checking every object in your structure.I understand that there might be some valid cases where
object?.property?.property
might be a shorter code, but it doesn't mean it should be implemented in the language.Once this is in language, the syntax will be overused and more shitty code will be written.
What if the API is not in your hand and you have no control over it?
I don't see it being overused in ruby or c# or any other language. Why should this happen in JS?
Assuming that objects returned from third-parties conform to a specific structure (and therefore, not 'verifying' their structure and the presence/lack-thereof of expected properties) is most-likely a security blunder.
Sorry, I don't fully understand what you mean.
A better pattern would be to use Option/Maybe or Either.
If I have something like:
var a = null;
rather than using a?.b I would use:
const a = fromNullable(a);
const aValue = a.map(_ => _.b).getOrElse("No value");
You can further chain like
a.chain(_ => .b)
.chain( => .c)
.chain( => _.d)
In your anti-corruption layer convert all nulls to Option/Maybe and you don't have to deal with nulls.
I would love to not deal with null/undefined in
JS
.I find the
?.
really elegant.But I also find Ruby elegant where things like this are normal.
I used this ugly piece:
(((foo || {}).bar || {}).baz || {}).xyz
🥺wow! this is gold
This is a piece of art! 🤣
It's worth mentioning the Nullish coalescing together with optional chaining. They're at the same stage in tc39 proposals. Here's a really good in-depth explanation.
That's true and thanks for the info.
The goal was to make this a more beginner-friendly and for me, the proposal stages and the blog from axel are more for advanced developers but yeah his blog is always good to read 😃👍
One more feature directly copied from CoffeeScript 😅 Great language,shame so few use it anymore.
'Optional Chaining' Is also called 'Safe navigation operator' and is supported by a lot of languages. Like Ruby, Swift, Kotlin, Rust, .NET, Objective-c and more 😊
Finally, it is coming to Javascript!
True, it certainly wasn't invented by CoffeeScript. Just considering how many CS features ended up in JS, it was quite visionary to see what JS was lacking (fat arrow, destructuring, default arguments, etc). And this happened almost 10 years ago!
That's also true :)
But it also had some problems.
I remember the old good times sitting in an IRC channel and seeing CoffeeScript problems popping up all the time ;)
If you wanna take a trip down the memory lane check out my reactive editor where i still write most things in CS :D
edide.io/whirl_of_geometry
Of course it supports JS as well, but I just love CS so much i never gave up on it 😅
Haha, that's amazing!
I mean if it works for you why not 😀
Remember using this in CoffeeScript in 2014 lol
I think that the chaining operator is a patch when you're not satisfying the law of demeter.
My post about Demeter's law on Dev.to (dev.to/carlillo/demeters-law-dont-...).
What do you think about that?
Yes, I'm on your side here!
the
?.
is a patch around bad object and API design.Having this deeply coupled and tightly integrated objects is never a good thing.
The problem is that you can not always control what data you are getting.
Another problem is that NoSQL databases promote deeply nested objects and then they don't provide any schema mechanisms. This was always a strange thing coming from SQL where Schemas were the norm.
But yeah nice article!
Thanks for your opinion 😊
Your welcome 😀👍
actually that lodash _.get methods looks pretty good.. could also have extra functionality to tell you which property was undefined, to help with debugging
and that lodash method COULD be added to the Object.prototype... so you COULD do..
person.lookup('details.name.fullName')
Maybe person is defined but is missing the details object. Maybe there's no fullName property. An actual function call could tell you these things in a very elegant want.
If anyone using Ramda library here we can use pathOr function which is like same optional chaining
But if this optional chaining is supported by default by javascript that would be better
Thanks @Iampewebdev
I hope it won't be overused like destructuring. I can already see the linting rules that dictate you have to use this 100% when working with objects.
Ooft, pet peeve right here.
When you need to use a single value that is passed in from an object and pass the whole object on.... No,
props.value
is fine, why am I being made to destructure and rebuild/copy my object just to use a single property.There will be a phase where you see it everywhere like with spreading but after a short time it will lose its novelty and people will use it more when it's needed. 😀🙌
The person example has two firstName. Both "Michael" and "Lampe" have the same firstName variable.
Oh noooo!
Thank you!
Changed it 🥳
Normally, new things in JS tend to underwhelm me. But this is so freaking awesome! Thanks for writing this up.
Indeed it is awesome and something that was needed 😀
So now js is following the syntax of c#
Yup it is and in this case, it is a good thing 😋
Reminds me of ruby’s Safe navigation operator
Because it is the same idea just a different syntax.
C# has had this for several years. One of my favorite features. Can't wait to see it officially release in TypeScript!
And in Javascript ;)
Wooah this is a really useful feature!! Thanks for sharing :D
Your welcome :)
I can't wait to use this :)
Me too!
It makes backend code so much easier :)
This is great! Thanks!
Thank you!
Super awesome and useful feature. Very handy for swift users as well.
Thank you :)
Glad that you liked it!
FINALLY!!!! thank you man
Your welcome!
Glad you liked it!
Thanks for sharing
Anyone know what the output looks like after running babel?