[padolsey]

I reckon there's a kind of broken rationale where people think, "ok well this value will mutate over time so I can't possibly use a const", even though a new block scope is initialized on each iteration. The `for(let i in blah)` idiom is basically cargo-culted now without thought.

[enumjorge]

It’s funny that you bring up cargo-culting because I find the unflinchingly rigid rule of “const for everything unless the code requires a let/var” to be cargo-cultish. I think it’s proponents vastly overestimate the value that you get out of it. In FE dev mutability is typically an issue at the app state level, and that’s not something you fix with const. It also doesn’t stop objects from being modified, and you shouldn’t make assumptions about what the underlying JS engine does with it as that can change.

Take the code in this article as an example. What danger can there possibly be with using a let when iterating over the set of characters in a word? The inside of the for loop is two lines long. The extra information that using const provides to whoever maintains this code is negligible. Using a const doesn’t hurt, but that level of nitpicking it doesn’t add much value whether in this thread or in code reviews.

[jeffeld]

It's not about adding value, it's about picking up bad habits from example code.