JS Pipeline Operator

What are your thoughts on the new Pipeline operator being proposed for JavaScript?

Currently they are working out the flavor of the syntax. Looks like it's between Hack and F# syntax.

Hack Flavor

Provides explicit placeholders. The operation pipes the previous result to the parameter holding the % sign.

value |> one(%) |> two(%) |> three(%)

value 
|> one('foo', %) 
|> two('bar', %) 
|> three('baz', %)

F# Flavor

Provides implicit syntax but could easily be paired with lambdas for more complex pipelines.

value |> one |> two |> three

value 
|> x => one('foo', x) 
|> x => two('bar', x) 
|> x => three('baz', x)

My Hot Take

Personally I don't like the Hack Flavor. I mainly crave the implicit syntax from F#. Adding an explicit special character to act as a placeholder seems rather annoying.

However, it sounds like the F# flavor comes with some performance pitfalls and could be more difficult to use with async code.

What do you think?

Comments

[VaiTon]

I think Kotlin did it the right way with .let. The default lambda parameter is it, but you can change it for clarity.

kotlinlang.org/docs/lambdas.html#i...

[Randall]

I tend to be pretty conservative about adding new language syntax because I feel the costs in terms of learning curve and cognitive load aren't always worth it.

I think this feature is one of those that complicates the language without giving us enough utility in return. It makes some code a bit more concise is all.

Maybe I should just go and use Go instead 🙃

[Jan Küster 🔥]

F# Syntax feels more intuitive and more like function composition.

[archi-jain]

But I think it makes code easier to understand for beginners