On 12/5/12 at 1:50 AM, jussi.kallioko...@gmail.com (Jussi
Kalliokoski) wrote:
I personally think returning `this` in absence of any meaningful value (and
chaining in general) is a bad pattern.
</lurk>
I have to agree with Jussi here. Whenever I consider chaining
using the returned values from the various things called, my
programming paranoia hair stands on end. Let me try to explain:
Whenever I program, I try to trust as little code as possible.
With chaining, there are two possibilities for getting the wrong
answer in the returned value:
* I or someone else wrote it, but screwed up,
* Someone hostile wrote it and is trying to trip me up.
If there is a language construct that allows chaining -- like
the Pascal "with" construct -- then I am only trusting the
language*, not other fragments of programs. If I depend on
things I call returning the correct "this", then I am depending
on them and my dependency set is a lot larger. A larger
dependency set makes me nervous.
Cheers - Bill
* For the really paranoid, minimizing the parts of the language
depended on is important. Not all JS implementations behave the
same way in the corner cases.
<lurk>
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Frantz |Security, like correctness, is| Periwinkle
(408)356-8506 |not an add-on feature. - Attr-| 16345
Englewood Ave
www.pwpconsult.com |ibuted to Andrew Tanenbaum | Los Gatos,
CA 95032
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