More and more great developers seem to acknowledge that:
const everywhere in modern JS is semantically weird and ugly (it's like hammering the wrong word again and again). It's not what you would expect in 99% of other programming languages out there. If brings confusion to new developers as well as experienced developers coming from other languages.
So I was wondering: how could we fix that? I mean, declaring variable is the basics of what is a programming language, yet JavaScript fails at that.
We could maybe introduce a true "no reassignment syntax" (final variables) that would look like that:
let :foo = 'bar'; // can't reassign foo here in contrast to let foo = 'bar';
It would also works elsewhere:
for (let :value of iterable) {
}
function (:param1, :param2) {
}
What do you think? I am not sure if this is a good idea or not, and I am not sure if there is a better character to use than the colon.
I think it's more elegant than using this wordy and semantically misleading const.
That some people believe const was a mistake doesn't mean that's a universally held opinion, either outside or within TC39. I think const is wonderful, and not a mistake, and I think it should be used everywhere :-)
"Weird" and "ugly" are subjective preferences that are also not universally shared - on this topic or any other.
const means "constant reference", not "constant value", and I think that educating people of that is a much more viable option than introducing another way to declare variables. const has shipped on the web (for 5+ years now) and can never be removed, so devs can't ever avoid needing to learn it anyways.
And to add to that, the JVM world is the exception in calling their constant references final - most other languages use const. Even the K combinator in lambda calculus, x => ignored => x, is typically named const in most functional languages that implement it (like Haskell), and the result, const x (equivalent to ignored => x), is itself more conceptually a constant reference rather than a constant value.
It's really hard to discuss stuff like that, because it's really about how we "feel" or "believe", not really about "real metrics". Is const really useful in a codebase or is it just wishful thinking? I have programmed in many languages in my career and I never had a single problem related to variable reassignment.
Yes in JavaScript const means "constant reference", not "constant value", but in computer science semantics, it's always a "constant value" like constant PI = 3.14. The keyword "final" would maybe better catch the idea of "constant reference".
let final foo = 'bar';
function (final foo) {
}
So we can use const to semantically signify a "constant value"?
Anyway, I hope one day I could ditch let and const altogether and do something like that in JS:
You complain about const because it's confusing to people from other languages, and then you propose let :foo ? Ask one of those folks on twitter what they think your syntax means. I guess no one will even get close to the actual meaning.
Also ... what is that new syntax supposed to do? A mere replacement for const? In that case you are a bit late to the party .... Or is it supposed to provide "real immutability"? If so, how? Freezing objects? Immutable References that do not support [[Set]] operations? What happens if you pass a :frozen to another function? Is it immutability there too?
Also mixed with object destructuring you can get full immutability also for objects with const, so I don't really get the point of those ranting:
