airbnb / airbnb/javascript

Best practices for promises?

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#216 49 comments 68 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
enhancement pull request wanted question
Dominant language
JavaScript
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Description

First of all, great job on this guide, I agree with it almost 100%. All of this should really be common knowledge, but I sure as hell didn't know most of these things when I started, so kudos for writing it all down.

Now, since promises have been standardized and a lot of people have started using them, it would be nice to have a section on how to keep promise-based code readable. For instance, when chaining multiple promises together, there are at least two alternative ways to do it:
#### Option 1: anonymous functions

``` javascript
return doSomething(foo).then(function(result) {
// ...
}).then(function(result2) {
// ...
}).then(function(result3) {
// ...
}).catch(function(error) {
// ...
}).finally(function() {
// ...
});
```
#### Option 2: named functions

``` javascript
function doThis(result) {
// ...
}
function doThat(result) {
// ...
}
function handleError(error) {
// ...
}
function done() {
// ...
}

return doSomething(foo)
.then(doThis)
.then(doThat)
.catch(handleError)
.finally(done);
```

The second way, while being somewhat more verbose, seems to be preferable, as the chain of tasks that the promise result travels through becomes more obvious.

I did an internal poll of our developers, and so far, option 2 seems to be ahead, although I have not heard from everyone yet. How does AirBnB deal with this, and what are your opinions?

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

Research direction

Start by reading the existing guide and its promise-related sections, then review this issue's discussion about anonymous versus named functions. Done means the project reaches a documented decision and the guide contains the agreed readability guidance.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
javascript
Domain
documentation
Issue type
Documentation
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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