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Comment by RobertKerans | Hacker News Reader

For JavaScript, Underscore is very good in terms of clean readability. LoDash is a better library, functionality-wise, but seems to have lost the quality somewhat.

Backbone and the Coffeescript compiler are also good; jashkenas & the contributors did a good job trying to put literary programming techniques to use, IMO.

The Elixir source code is very high quality; same applies to the Ecto library. Elixir code in general, because of the focus on including detailed documentation (including doctests) within the code, tends to be very readable. The way the REPL is set up means the docs for modules or functions can be accessed at any point, so it's good for pragmatic reasons.

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https://github.com/jashkenas/underscore/blob/master/undersco...

Thanks, have crap WiFi ATM and can't get online for more than a few minutes at a time, I'll add the rest of the links once I'm back in the UK

> LoDash is a better library, functionality-wise, but seems to have lost the quality somewhat

Where do you see a loss in quality?

I wish there was an edit button for older posts: I meant to qualify that. The actual pragmatic quality may be higher (particularly re terrific speed optimisations, with bitmasks etc), but the cleanness and readability I feel has dropped (some due to extreme modularisation, which is v useful but makes reading source painful). There aren't as many comments, which seems kinda minor except in the context of Jeremy Ashkenas' attempts at literate programming, esp via Docco, which IMO was fairly successful. I still use Underscore source and docs as reference. LoDash I find has pretty awful docs in terms of how they're arranged vs Underscore, but that could just be due to experience.

Lodash source is available as a monolithic build or modules so you can take your pick.

Lodash has plenty of comments (jsdoc, bug fix notes, and implementation explanations). Underscore has stripped many of these leading to devs making the same mistakes or introducing regressions.

Lodash docs are arranged in alphabetic order. Underscore docs aren't and even have thing miscategorized.

+1 for Elixir, it was very easy to dive in the codebase and to start contributing even for somebody with limited Elixir/Erlang exp

Yeah, I've found it the best experience I've ever had with a language in terms of ramping up from zero, and the focus on clean, readable code with documentation built in is a major part of that.

Caveat: came from Ruby, so the syntax was very friendly. But I'd say as an aside that it's the first programming language I've experienced, (coming via a helluva lot of functional JS) that's both functional and completely pragmatic in terms of focussing on what's useful and necessary. Really impressive.

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