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Discussion on: Let's talk about Lodash

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merri profile image
Vesa Piittinen • Edited

I dislike lodash, ramda etc. as JavaScript has become quite capable in expressing meaning very well. Reading code that suddenly uses utility functions makes it much slower to understand the code as you need to look up what those functions actually do. Everybody seems to like a different library and if project has not maintained discipline, well, life becomes troublesome for a maintainer.

Of course reading specs for just one function isn't a problem, but it seems like once somebody starts to think of a problem through utility functions they sure seem to make sure to use as many different utility functions as they can in one go. They have fun learning the functions, but as a reader the functions are more of a pain - and still all too often you can refactor the code to shorter native JS while not having undesired side effects (tests are nice).

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Alex Lohr

That's another good point. While some of these helpers are pretty obvious in the functionality (though not in the implementation; you'll end up with a lot of unused edge case handling, take isEmpty for example), many of them require a lot of documentation and are quite difficult to read.