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Comment by davej | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the feedback. I would argue that the Classy example is more expressive and crucially it is DRY.

Edit:

> One of the brilliant things about angular is that it provides a proper structure that anyone that needs to write angular needs to adhere to

Angular doesn't provide structure for controllers, they are just javascript functions. If you want to add structure it is up to the individual developer to decide how to do it. Classy is just the way that I like to do it, Classy is opinionated so it won't be for everyone.

By the way, you can do inheritance but I haven't documented and fully tested it yet.

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Angular's dependency injection is still a matter of discussion and a lot of people are not completely happen with it. It'll also be made into something different for angular 2.0.

Still, besides that: DRY is IMO not about these 2 lines that you've refactored away here. It's about whole functions/classes that have similar functionality where you're repeating yourself.

Therefore, this would be a micro-optimisation with negative results on impact on performance most likely (since there's more overhead)

The point of DRY is to reduce the types of errors that repetition lends itself to. A very common member of that class of errors is "I should have repeated something, but I didn't". It is pretty easy to run into that error with Angular's injection - you can forget to add either the string or the argument, or (worse) you can get the order wrong. Eliminating the repetition fixes that class of errors, so I think it's well within the realm of "what DRY is about".

I ran into this exact thing just a few days ago. I added a dependency to an existing controller, and it threw an error because I'd only added the dependency in one place instead of both.

This is absolutely one of the things that DRY is about.

I can see Classy adding value, but repetition with dependency injection is a solved problem if you use ngmin[1].

[1]: https://github.com/btford/ngmin

I disagree that ngmin is a full solution to the problem. It is a good and very helpful tool, but it's a hack and a pretty leaky one - I think it's often less of a hassle to just write all the explicit injection syntax myself than to fiddle with formatting to get ngmin to work and track down issues when it doesn't. Classy's solution seems much nicer to me.

I have no idea what you're talking about; I've never had any issues with ngmin or angular's default (i.e. non-array / string) injection methods.

I guess your mileage may vary, but in my experience, it isn't difficult to write reasonable code that ngmin fails to handle properly, and it's difficult to debug when it happens. It seems the best thing to do is to start with ngmin from the get-go and adopt a style guide that works with it. But I like the idea of a library that abstracts it away altogether.

> Angular doesn't provide structure for controllers, they are just javascript functions. If you want to add structure it is up to the individual developer to decide how to do it.

This is a pretty big one to me. Angular provides tons of structure all over the place, with only one real exception: controllers. Some of my controllers stick out like sore thumbs in my code. I like how Classy gives them some structure not unlike the structure that directives already have.

I would argue that if your controllers are getting that complicated, then you're doing it wrong.

Wouldn't you need to be doing `var self = this` in every function you have nested anonymous callbacks touching $scope though?

Yes or function.bind() or fat-arrow in Coffeescript. It's usually best practice to move that kind of stuff into a service instead though.

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