[untog]

The exception I'd add is that JavaScript's standard library is still very weak. I find myself leaning on Lodash for functionality that would be built into any other language.

Part of me would love for TS to build one out and add shims as part of the transpilation process, but it would go miles out of the scope of what TS is trying to do. And I love that (compared to Babel) TS has no plugins and relatively few options.

[Stoids]

To add onto this, using lodash + TS is not the most pleasant experience. A lot of that has to due with current limitations of the type system (mostly variadic types [0]), but I find myself having to provide lots of generics rather than relying on inference. The overloads are not great.

I say this all with recognition that lodash greatly predates TS, and the maintainers have done an absolutely wonderful job in keeping up with the overall ecosystem (ESM, typings files, etc). I can't even begin to comprehend the amount of work that has gone in to keeping lodash so modern.

That being said, I wish the interaction was slightly better, since a lot of people just immediately bring in Lodash to any JS project.

[0] https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues/5453

[arcticfox]

I have the same experience; I wonder if anyone is working on a TS-friendly utility library, or if our best hope is the work on TS itself on [0]?

[chrisweekly]

I wonder if ramda is any better in that regard?

[kristiandupont]

I love Ramda and use it everywhere but sadly, it's somewhat lacking when it comes to type definitions. Everything in Ramda is curried and the types just don't reflect that very well so you get quite a few incorrect compiler errors.

[chrisweekly]

Yeah, I remember liking the auto-currying, that makes sense it has a downside here.

[TJSomething]

Shouldn't tuples in rest parameters from TypeScript 3.0 [0] fix that?

[0] https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/release-notes/t...

[Nimelrian]

Not entirely.

For example, a function which takes a property path (in the form of an array of strings) and an object as parameters and returns the value at that path inside the object still needs overloads for every single tuple length.

  type Key = string | number | symbol;
  
  function get<T, K extends keyof T>(path: [K], obj: T): T[K];
  function get<T, K1 extends keyof T, K2 extends keyof T[K1]>(path: [K1, K2], obj: T): T[K1][K2];
  function get<T, K1 extends keyof T, K2 extends keyof T[K1], K3 extends keyof T[K1][K2]>(path: [K1, K2, K3], obj: T): T[K1][K2][K3];
  function get<T, K1 extends keyof T, K2 extends keyof T[K1], K3 extends keyof T[K1][K2], K4 extends keyof T[K1][K2][K3]>(path: [K1, K2, K3, K4], obj: T): T[K1][K2][K3][K4];
  function get(path: Key[], obj: any) {
      if (path.length === 0) {
          return obj;
      }
      const key = path[0] as Key;
      const rest = path.slice(1) as [Key];
      return get(rest, obj[key]);
  }
  
  
  interface Foo {
      foo: {
          bar: {
              baz: {
                  val: number;
              }
          }
      }
  }
  
  declare const foo: Foo;
  const num = get(["foo", "bar", "baz", "val"], foo);

In this case, num is implicitly typed as number, but if the path would be longer, you'd need to add more overloads.

[arcturus17]

I keep hearing that but I dunno. I’m building a fairly large side project in Express + React and I keep finding ways of doing things in ES6 - lodash is still not to be found in package.json. I think I might cave in eventually but as it stands my code feels clean and succinct and it’s all done in modern functional style.

[untog]

One example is doing deep comparison on objects. ES6 still has no equivalent for that, and it's something you can do in one line in other languages.

[patates]

Which languages? I'd think it's rare because I know no such standard function from the top of my head.

[untog]

Swift immediately comes to mind - structs are value types. Also, Kotlin has data classes.

[julien_c]

`util.deepStrictEqual` in Node at least

[sonnyblarney]

This is a very good point.

I wish lodashy functions, and a few other things (Time?), were just integrated into JS, in a thoughtful way ... as part of the standard lib. So they could all be done in native code in the engine.

[zachrose]

I’m sympathetic to this point of view, but I find lodash to be too huge of an API. Most of the collection methods can be done as a small _.reduce, and I find the many method names and subtle distinctions to add more trivia than they remove.

[untog]

The good news is that you can use lodash as an ES6 module, with any tree-shake capable bundler stripping out all the crap. Absolutely agree it's not optimal though.

[arusahni]

This is a pain point that the community wishes to address: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-javascript-standard-library

[austincheney]

I don’t see this going very far for historical reasons. This idea has been suggested for over a decade, but back then the focus of inspiration was jQuery. The false argument was that everybody was requesting it into pages anyways so it should be part of the language. Not only was this idea proposed on top of a faulty assumption but there were also performance penalties and hidden conformance defects.

These suggestions fall apart over time because they aren’t environment agnostic and lack objectivity. The subjectivity in question, “I want feature X”, usually doesn’t take alternate positions into consideration.

[Nimelrian]

The proposal explicitly states that everything in the standard library would not be tied to specific target environments:

Such a library would only cover features which would be useful in JavaScript in general, not things which are tied to the web platform. (A good heuristic: if something would make sense on a web browser but not in node or on embedded devices or robots, it probably isn't in scope.)

[_ZeD_]

Truth be said, jQuery can be seen obsolete because most of the functionality has been moved inside the DOM or the ajax "standard library" ...

[austincheney]

This certainly wasn't a popular opinion 10 years ago. The history lesson here is that popular is a subjective quality that does not provide objective benefits, which is clear in a future time.

[_ZeD_]

Well, as I said you could think that is jQuery "has been added" to the javascript expected api. Some functions calls has been renamed, others have been superseded, but the "vanillajs" of 201x is pretty different from the 199x - and more similar to the jQuery usage.

jQuery rise (but also underscore and others "low level libs) was interwined with the need of common functionalities, such as the DOM manipolation and the ajax calls. I still remember when all you could use was the .innerHTML property and the "new" DOM level 1 api [ https://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-DOM-Level-1-19981001/ ]. jQuery selectors were so game-changing that the "new" DOM api were basically copied.

I understand how incredibly difficult is to find a good balance between an "anemic" stdlib (like the barely sufficient c stdlib) to the giant ones (like java has had), moreso that a bad/poorly secured function should still be mantained "forever" for backward compatibility.

Still I think that this movement should go forward to finally have some form of "batteries included"

[kristiandupont]

I guess I disagree as I much prefer Ramdas style over Lodash.. Is your concern about performance? Because I don't think it would be a massive improvement over JS code.

[vinniejames]

Curious what you're still often using lodash for?

[untog]

One thing that comes to mind is comparison - array equality, deep object comparison, that sort of thing.