Who maintains your JS?
My last post discussed techniques I once saw as the height of cleverness but now deem foolish. The truth is: I’m still battling with these coding dilemmas everyday… It seems to be a constant game of cleverness/terseness/speed vs. verbosity/readability.
We’re told to write code for the poor soul who has to maintain it in the future. What nobody tells you is how much knowledge this poor soul has, both about the language and the problem domain. People also say to expect this future maintainer to be an idiot — this will mean you write the most understandable code possible. But again: how much of an idiot is this person?
The fact is: we have a set of unspoken assumptions we tend to make about this mystery future maintainer.
The following are mostly assumptions related to JavaScript syntax. Unexplored assumptions are ‘Design patterns’, ‘OOP’, ‘The problem domain’ etc.
Level 1 maintainer Sentient humanoid Speaks/Writes English well Knows what JavaScript is Has programmed before Level 2 maintainer Knows the correct syntax for if, else, for, while, do, throw, function, var … Knows about types Knows all the types available in JS Knows the difference between a statement and an expression Level 3 maintainer Knows about strict vs. non-strict equality operators Knows about short-circuiting in logical operators Knows the difference between Arrays and array-like Objects Knows several ways to cast a value, and ways to implicitly force coercion Knows regular expressions to an intermediate level (anchors, alternation, character classes) Level 4 maintainer Knows what a bitwise operator does Knows about primitives vs. objects, and wrapped primitives for method calling Knows what a closure is Knows how properties are resolved via the prototype chain Knows the differences between prefix and postfix increment operators Knows about variable/function-declaration hoisting Knows the exact difference between x==null and x===null Knows the difference between function declarations and function expressions Level 5 maintainer Knows how to check types without using typeof or instanceof Knows why new Number(1) != new Number(1) Knows regular expressions well (lookarounds, capture vs. no-capture, greed) Knows what named function expressions are Knows the side effects of bitwise operations in JavaScript Level 6 maintainer (Eich level) Knows what values are returned by all JavaScript operators Knows all precedence and associativity of all operators Knows where ASI will put semi-colons Knows the subtle differences between ES 3.1, 5.1 and 6th Edition draft*** The above is not exhaustive and is very subjective. I don’t wish to compartmentalize understanding into levels — it’s misleading. I just wanted to somehow portray these assumptions in a clearly understandable way.
I think most devs simply do not consider a future maintainer that is any less capable than themselves, and perhaps this is a problem. If you mark yourself as a maintainer 4.5 then is it fair for you to write in a way that presumes that all future readers of your code are
Read Full Post at James Padolsey
