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Comment by quinnirill | Hacker News Reader

(Disclosure, Trine author here, and also admittedly very inspired by Ramda.)

I actually used Ramda quite extensively a while back, because I was convinced it was the right way. However, a while after looking at stack traces that lead to Ramda and not even myself understanding my where each parameter in my own code goes, I decided to stop using it and also dropped these features from Trine. Trine has partial, and that's as far as magic goes, in fact I wanted to make it as far from magical as possible. I think plain old functions are the best form of function composition, albeit I'd love for the syntax to be terser. They're easy to read and easy to reason about, also easy to reorder, no need for higher order functions that go in the middle.

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It's a funny world. Each of us is looking at the other library thinking there's too much magic involved. :-)

Ramda is [considering a technique][1] that would significantly reduce call stacks. But there is nothing likely to help with you understand parameter orders of your functions. Many users annotate their functions with something like Haskell signatures.

Thank you for bringing forth another interesting library. I'll be following your progress. Best of luck!

[1]: https://github.com/ramda/ramda/pull/907

> It's a funny world. Each of us is looking at the other library thinking there's too much magic involved. :-)

Heh - I think what feels like magic is the syntax that Trine is presuming, which admittedly might seem magical before trying it out. :) The library itself is just a collection of very primitive methods (with the exception of partial()).

> Ramda is [considering a technique][1] that would significantly reduce call stacks.

That's good to hear! But what I'd really like to see is something that would make the stack trace have a reference to the function definition site, e.g. if I have an error like

    var getIds = map(prop("id"));
    var ids = getIds([{ id: 1 }, null, { id: 2 }]);

the stack trace would also show the definition site of getIds. This is what I get when I compose functions just using the vanilla JS syntax:

    function getIds (items) {
      return items.map(function (item) {
        return item.id; // the stack trace will point here, and I can also add a breakpoint here without it stopping on every unrelated prop() call
      });
    }

Like I mentioned on several occasions here, I'm hoping for JS to get simpler unbound function syntax, which would work well with Trine, and still have the aforementioned benefits:

    let getIds = -> this::map(-> this.id);

> Best of luck!

Thank you, and likewise! <3

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