alt Hacker NewsI really don't like this article. It has a catchy, profound-sounding title that people bandy about to argue against stuff they don't like.
All functions, even non-async functions, are colored. In any large system codebase you'll have functions that can only be called in certain situations, with the right setup, whatever, and if you're lucky this is communicated by types but regardless those restrictions can't be avoided. It's easy to call low-restriction functions from high-restriction ones and not the other way around.
Furthermore, it's not like the alternative to explicit await doesn't have issues too (that the article doesn't mention). There is inherent complexity, it's a tradeoff, you can't just syntax it away.
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Every time this is posted, it’s worth reminding: async functions in JavaScript are the correct design, and the people who did it deserve praise.
Yep. It's not an async vs not async thing. The way some people talk about it, you'd think the async keyword was at fault. It's all about whether a function is callable in some context.
Passing in the context as an argument or making it a global variable or returning a monad doesn't do anything to uncolor the function. What's the difference between `async function f()` and `function f(eventloop, callback)`? Only syntax.
Not to mention there's lots of colors unrelated to async, that most languages don't type at all. And if you use the wrong one, your program just doesn't work correctly at runtime. Thread-safe vs thread-unsafe. Blocking vs non-blocking. May throw/panic vs won't throw/panic. May fail/return null vs infallible.