VictorTaelin

async/await is just the do-notation of the Promise monad

CertSimple just wrote a blog post arguing ES2017's async/await was the best thing to happen with JavaScript. I wholeheartedly agree.

In short, one of the (few?) good things about JavaScript used to be how well it handled asynchronous requests. This was mostly thanks to its Scheme-inherited implementation of functions and closures. That, though, was also one of its worst faults, because it led to the "callback hell", an seemingly unavoidable pattern that made highly asynchronous JS code almost unreadable. Many solutions attempted to solve that, but most failed. Promises almost did it, but failed too. Finally, async/await is here and, combined with Promises, it solves the problem for good. On this post, I'll explain why that is the case and trace a link between promises, async/await, the do-notation and monads.

First, let's illustrate the 3 styles by implementing

stanislavb

#!/bin/bash

# Do not run if removal already in progress.
pgrep "docker rm" && exit 0

# Remove Dead and Exited containers.
docker rm $(docker ps -a | grep "Dead\|Exited" | awk '{print $1}'); true

# It will fail to remove images currently in use.
docker rmi $(docker images -qf dangling=true); true

amysimmons

#Understanding closures, callbacks and promises

For a code newbie like myself, callbacks, closures and promises are scary JavaScript concepts.

10 months into my full-time dev career, and I would struggle to explain these words to a peer.

So I decided it was time to face my fears, and try to get my head around each concept.

Here are the notes from my initial reading. I'll continue to refine them as my understanding improves.

branneman

Better local require() paths for Node.js

Problem

When the directory structure of your Node.js application (not library!) has some depth, you end up with a lot of annoying relative paths in your require calls like:

const Article = require('../../../../app/models/article');

Those suck for maintenance and they're ugly.

Possible solutions