A 'setter' should never ever cause an action to be triggered, and especially not immediately inside the setter.
At the least change the naming, like `navigate_to(href)`.
But in the browser environment it's also perfectly clear why it is not happening immediately, your entire JS code is essentially just a callback which serves the browser event loop and tells it what to do next. A function which never returns to the caller doesn't fit into the overall picture.
> A function which never returns to the caller doesn't fit into the overall picture.
Hmm, not sure about this. On the node side, you can process.exit() out of a callback. If setting href worked like that, I think it would be less confusing.
How do you imagine this would interact with try-finally being used to clean up resources, release locks, close files, and so forth?
For this reason, try-finally is at best a tool for enforcing local invariants in your code. When a function like process.exit() completely retires the current JavaScript environment, there’s no harm in skipping `finally` blocks.