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Comment by dpweb | Hacker News Reader

These emperor has no clothes posts are very popular, and some may ask what's the point. It's a question worth considering. I think by instinct people especially programmer/engineer types like the idea of purity.

But if you consider that every decision must be put through a cost/benefit analysis, I think the appeal is that - I (or anyone in the future that will ever touch the code) must learn JS. OK. Now they must also learn framework X. That's the added cost.

Our memory is limited too, like a computer chip. When I know JS I can instantly access what I need. If you think of a Google or cheat sheet lookup like a disk access, well memory is faster than disk.

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My rationale is that any one of these functions is probably going to be put into a utility function that's documented and named already, and of course tested with some optimizations, in some file somewhere in my code base. If it's useful enough, it'll probably be there. And while I don't often do front end, having these utilities support older versions of browsers or if there exist quirks in certain versions of browsers that render the solution nonviable is just not something I want to spend time caring about. When I did Java, the same articles would come out about Guava and Apache Commons.

One should not be afraid to use battle tested libraries, but don't bring dependencies for no reason.

> Our memory is limited too,

Is that really true, though? I mean, there most probably is some theoretical limit how much data can fit in a structure of particular shape composed of particular number of neurons, but are we really hitting that limit? Are we even capable of hitting this limit after a lifetime of learning and experiencing? It may feel that way, but it could be a side-effect of some focus-switching and memory-compressing heuristics implemented by the brain.

What I mean is that there are obviously people who learned both JS and a framework, so why wouldn't anyone be able to do this? And I can guarantee that, once you learn it, both JS and a framework fit in your 'cache' perfectly. Actually, I felt no difference between recalling things before I learned a framework and after.

In other words, learning a new framework should be possible for anyone. And programmers are expected to continuously learn new things anyway, it's not "added" cost, it's just part of the job. From this point of view, I can't see any problems with introducing a library, given that it's a good library (docs, active maintainers, community, etc.)

If losash provides a more consistent API than the built-ins, then the memory requirements actually go down.

> If you think of a Google or cheat sheet lookup like a disk access, well memory is faster than disk.

I like this analogy - not just its application to the current conversation, but because I consider myself to be understanding of a topic when I no longer have to look it up, but instead I know the topic in principle and all I lookup are minor details (maybe like an address in memory to find something on disk?)

At this point I would consider JS purity to be the One Standard Prelude with all the usually functional goodies in one nice package. You know, with real tests and whatnot. Underscore/Lodash comes pretty close to that.

> I (or anyone in the future that will ever touch the code) must learn JS. OK. Now they must also learn framework X.

Well you can forget the parts of JS covered by the framework. I don't really care about the native Array.map or whatever functions, because they won't always behave as I expect, while the lodash (or equivalent) will. I can't recall off the top of my head how to use XMLHttpRequest. But I don't need to and haven't needed to in a while, because every project I've worked on uses jQuery or another framework which provided better ajax methods.

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