2022-03 plenary bikeshedding slides

Possible criteria

Syntactic clarity

Would human readers often have difficulty with determining the syntax’s grouping?

Conciseness

Is the syntax significantly improve conciseness over the status quo?

Natural word order

Is the syntax’s word order more natural (e.g., subject.verb(object)) than the status quo?

Confusability with other JS features

Is there a risk of beginners and other developers confusing the syntax with regular dot property access?

Confusability with other languages

Is there a risk of developers confusing the syntax with visually similar syntaxes from other languages – especially if they have different semantics?

Overlap with other JavaScript features

Does the syntax greatly overlap with other features of the language?
(Note: A finding from the January post-plenary overflow meeting says, “In general, some overlap is okay, but too much is bad; we have to decide this on a case-by-case basis.”)

List of candidates

Receiver-first style (loose unbracketed)

This style was originally called “bind-this”, but we dropped function binding from it in 2022-03, so we renamed the style to “receiver first”.

rec :> fn(arg0)
rec ~> fn(arg0)
rec !> fn(arg0)
rec -> fn(arg0) 
rec #> fn(arg0)
rec ~~ fn(arg0)

Receiver-first style (tight bracketed)

This style was originally called “bind-this”, but we dropped function binding from it in 2022-03, so we renamed the style to “receiver first”.

rec:>fn(arg0)
rec~>fn(arg0)
rec->fn(arg0)
rec::fn(arg0)
rec:.fn(arg0)
rec-.fn(arg0)
rec..fn(arg0)

Receiver-first style (bracketed)

rec~[fn](arg0)
rec![fn](arg0)
rec#[fn](arg0)
rec..[fn](arg0)

Function-first style

This style was originally called “call-this”, but we are now calling it “function first” to distinguish it from receiver-first call-this. See the original explainer by @tabatkins.

fn@.(rec, arg0)

This-argument style

First proposed by @rbuckton.

fn(this: rec, arg0)