Discussion on: Rethinking JavaScript: The complete elimination and eradication of JavaScript's this.

[zeddotes]

Precisely.

[JavaScript Joel]

Which is A LOT of people! I'm not fabricating problems out of mid air. A very large number of people do have issues with this. You can tell by the number of articles written explaining the concept. The number of questions asked on stack overflow. Every JavaScript interview will include questions to see if you understand what this is.

It's a complicated subject for a lot of developers. I do not know a single developer that hasn't written console.log(this) at some point in their careers.

The problem with this cannot be simplified into "that's just how scope works".

This code is a good example of that. By simply using a destructured argument, the scope is unexpectedly changed.

const logSpeak = animal => console.log(animal.speak())
const logSpeak =({ speak }) => console.log(speak())

The reason why this happens is explained when you fully understand this. But to many developers they will stumble on this. Just search stack overflow.

[Sampson Crowley]

So because it's something that people have to learn, that means it's a problem? No.

Arrow functions are designed to preserve scope. That's what they exist for. There is nothing "surprising" about them. Just people that haven't actually learned the language

YOU DONT DESIGN CODE AROUND "DEVELOPERS" THAT DONT UNDERSTAND THE LANGUAGE.

[JavaScript Joel]

If it's something that a majority of developers stumble on, then yes it's a problem.

Much in the same way NULL has been described as the Billion dollar mistake. NULL is a MUCH more simple concept to grasp than this. Yet now because we decide to use null, we have introduced an entire class of bugs into our application. All those lovely NullReferenceException bugs.

It doesn't matter how good of a programmer you are, YOU WILL run into NullReferenceException bugs.

Of course, there are ways to program without NULL. And this would eliminate that entire class of bug from your application. But we don't (myself included).

If we can program in a way that can completely eliminate entire classes of bugs, why would we choose not do to so?