Discussion on: Keeping Your Code Simple

[tiff]

Yes. My friend told me I should break them out into separate variables so I tried going with that. He gave me a solid example. The difference between what I do and what he does are magnitudes different though: he's responsible for the lives of train passengers and I am just a web dev. I can understand him wanting to simplify it into separate variables as his code needs to keep people physically safe and a bad bug could cost lives. But this reads a bit better.

[Iñaki Arroyo]

Not trying to be rude here, just giving my point of view, but, I am so far to be agreed with you here, as a web dev or just as a dev you should always consider writing your code in a way that it doesn't break "the train", hiding the possibility of making bugs due to you are just a web dev is a very poor excuse. From my point of view, thinking in that way ends in having bugs over bugs into the projects.

[Will Vincent]

Even if you're "just a web dev" your code really ought to be given the same amount of care as if it were responsible for people's lives. :)

But if you really want to be clever, and keep it readable, it can be dramatically shortened with lodash's maxBy method...

const _ = require('lodash')

const strings = [
  '12345',
  '123',
  '1234567',
  '12',
  '1',
  '123456',
  '1234',
]

const result = _.maxBy(strings, string => string.length)

I'm sure the code challenge requires no external libraries, but that's not necessarily anything like a real-world requirement.

Interestingly, lodash uses a for loop for this, for what it's worth..