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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps it depends what you're doing?

IMO:

    .where('column_a', '=', 'value1')
    .and(q => q.isNull('column_b').orWhere('column_b', '=', 'value2')))

is a lot less readable than:

    WHERE
       column_a = 'value1'
       AND (column_b IS NULL OR column_b = 'value2')

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In Django that would be .filter(column_a='value1', Q(column_b__isnull=True)|Q(column_b='value2'))

And obviously you can use whatever indentations you like.

Ah, that's quite a bit nicer. You can't do that in JavaScript on two counts:

- No keyword arguments

- No operator overloading (so you can't override | to get the nice "or" syntax)

I actually messed it up a little because I'm not sure you can mix positional and kwargs in filter, and you definitely can't use kwargs first. Still, the idea is there.

In JS, theoretically you could design an API like

.where({column_a: 1}, Q(column_b__isnull=True).or({column_b: 2}))

Which really isn't bad IMO

It's been a bit since I've used Django, but I believe you can just swap the order so the kwarg comes last.

    filter(     Q(column_b__isnull=True)|Q(column_b='value2'),
      column_a='value1',
    )

Or just turn it into another Q

    .filter(Q(column_a='value1'), Q(column_b__isnull=True)|Q(column_b='value2'))

The docs show both of those as working examples, but Q supports using & for "and", and can be combined in any way - you could also do this:

  .filter(Q(column_a='value1') & (Q(column_b__isnull=True) | Q(column_b='value2')))

One of these my IDE can typecheck and apply code hightlighting, the other is just a blob of text.

On my case that would be SQL, as I use nice SQL aware IDEs for Oracle and SQL Server.

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