One of my guilty pleasures is to rewrite trivial functions to be statements free.

Since I’d be too self-conscious to put those in a PR, I keep those mostly to myself.

For example, here’s an XPath wrapper:

const $$$ = (q,d=document,x=d.evaluate(q,d),a=[],n=x.iterateNext()) => n ? (a.push(n), $$$(q,d,x,a)) : a;

Which you can use as $$$("//*[contains(@class, 'post-')]//*[text()[contains(.,'fedilink')]]/../../..") to get an array of matching nodes.

If I was paid to write this, it’d probably look like this instead:

function queryAllXPath(query, doc = document) {
    const array = [];
    const result = doc.evaluate(query, doc);
    let node= result.iterateNext();
    while (node) {
        array.push(node);
        n = result.iterateNext();
    }
    return array;
}

Seriously boring stuff.

Anyway, since var/let/const are statements, I have no choice but to use optional parameters instead, and since loops are statements as well, recursion saves the day.

Would my quality of life improve if the lambda body could be written as => if n then a.push(n), $$$(q,d,x,a) else a ? Obviously, yes.

The whole idea of expressions is very nice, and I can’t imagine using ternary expressions anywhere after learning Rust.

Also implicit returns ❤️

and then you have lua

local result = condition and a or b

I’m not complaining, although it gets a little confusing when one of the results is falsey. Which is a rarity since only false and nil are falsey in lua.

Having some experience with both Python and JS/TS, I don’t have much preference about ternaries or expressions. Although I always break lines for ternary statements.

const testStuff = condition ? 
  outcome(1) :
  outcome(2);

Having everything on the same line ruins readability for me.