arrows and a proposed softCall

[Brendan Eich]

Brendan Eich wrote:
> Clarity depends on many things including how well documented or 
> commented the code -- especially that contract that we just agreed 
> exists -- might be. 

One thing I forgot to write:

With array extras such as forEach, almost always the contract is local 
and needs no docs or comments. Indeed people write

   function outerMethod() {
     ...
     anArray.forEach(function (elem) {
       ... this /* oops */ ...
     });
     ...
   }

IIRC this was an error from real life that tomvc showed to the list.

Implicit, local contracts where lexical |this| is required are exactly 
the use-case for =>. Kevin Smith's analysis, although it studied only a 
few codebases and isn't some kind of definitive empirical study, 
suggests that this use-case, combined with those where functions don't 
use |this| at all, dominate.

But now I'm repeating myself. The point here was that the contract is 
often local and even implicit in the sense that JS hackers, even 
experienced ones, fall into the trap.

As with most programming errors, there's no perfect defense in style or 
language restriction short of avoiding |this| altogether. But there's 
good clarity based on the local contract and implicitly lexical |this| 
in the above code rewritten to use =>:

   function outerMethod() {
     ...
     anArray.forEach(elem => {
       ... this /* yay! */ ...
     });
     ...
   }

I'm sorry this doesn't extend to your mixin library. If we had -> then 
your users who want shorter syntax would have a choice, but that choice 
creates the option to choose wrongly, and the extra complexity combined 
with the common-case analyses from Kevin and others caused us to add 
only => to ES6 as proposed.

/be