Oh, I totally agree! The thing is that my old-skool brain just kinda "fits" naturally into loops. So when I'm first thinking through the solution, I often reach for the forEach as the first thing out of the toolbox.
You're absolutely correct that a for loop is not "evil". But I've also learned that, as you pointed out, something rarely needs to be a forEach. And when I fall into a lazy habit of submitting code that's littered with forEach loops, the other devs on my team tend to notice (rightfully so).
So rather than beat myself up over it, I just write the logic the way it first "appears" in my brain. Then I give it a once-over, and I might refactor some of those forEach loops if they don't feel optimal. (And as you said, they rarely are.)
I used to be this way about ternary operators. I would write everything with traditional if/else, then I would look at it and think, "This should be a ternary" - so I'd change it. It took quite a while, but now I pretty much "think" in ternaries. I'm not quite there yet with all of the Array.prototype functions - but I'm definitely a lot closer than I was several years ago.
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Oh, I totally agree! The thing is that my old-skool brain just kinda "fits" naturally into loops. So when I'm first thinking through the solution, I often reach for the
forEachas the first thing out of the toolbox.You're absolutely correct that a for loop is not "evil". But I've also learned that, as you pointed out, something rarely needs to be a
forEach. And when I fall into a lazy habit of submitting code that's littered withforEachloops, the other devs on my team tend to notice (rightfully so).So rather than beat myself up over it, I just write the logic the way it first "appears" in my brain. Then I give it a once-over, and I might refactor some of those
forEachloops if they don't feel optimal. (And as you said, they rarely are.)I used to be this way about ternary operators. I would write everything with traditional
if/else, then I would look at it and think, "This should be a ternary" - so I'd change it. It took quite a while, but now I pretty much "think" in ternaries. I'm not quite there yet with all of theArray.prototypefunctions - but I'm definitely a lot closer than I was several years ago.