TypeScript: Vote for Experimental Support of Optional Chaining | Hacker News Reader

TypeScript: Vote for Experimental Support of Optional Chaining

github.com

15 pointsIvanGoncharov13 comments

Clarification: TS team is aware of this feature desire and has a plan to support it (their plan is hinged on an existing standard that is still being locked down for JS; details in https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues/16).

No real benefit in voting on it now, other than to express your added desire for a thing the TS team already knows people want.

Language design should not be determined by "votes".

Wellllllll....

Languages are used by people. So it depends, a lot, on the goals of the stewards of a language. Votes can be a useful signal for whether or not people are going to care about your language enough to adopt it.

... but it's absolutely true that voters can vote for the moon and then skip off blissfully, never having to worry about how you implement the Apollo project.

Yeah, votes aren't useless. Obviously you shouldn't just go implement the things that get the most votes without question and ignore everything else. However, if there's two things I think I should implement and the community is much more excited about one than the other, I should probably do that one first. If something gets a whole bunch of votes and I think it's a bad idea that means I need to actually take the time to explain why it's bad rather than just leaving it languishing in the backlog. If I think something's going to be great but it doesn't have a lot of votes, it means that I need to put more work into explaining why it's useful than I might otherwise.

Language design priorities should definitely decided based on votes.

Correct.

It is valuable feedback though.

It's been years since this proposal and everyone keeps arguing over semantics yet I don't see any semantics being changed. So what's the holdup? I understand constraints and external factors/dependencies but this seems like such a trivial change that it boggles me we don't have this as a standard feature yet.

Interesting. I think I saw this in Swift? Or c#? I guess in Python this is where EAFP comes in.

I definitely hate chains of guards to get at a nested property.

In haskell the lens library does this -- it's a useful feature to have.

C# has it.

Yep, they're called null conditional operators[1].

[1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-refe...

Quite a few language have this feature, and it is a Stage 1 proposal to become a part of the JS spec

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Option_type

Reply on news.ycombinator.com