Greppability is an underrated code metric

Re:Greppability is an underrated code metric by wruza on Tuesday September 03, 2024 @10:25AM (#41435300)

Not sure what you find not true about it. All named “function”s get hoisted just like “var”s, I use post-definitions of utility functions all the time in file scopes, function scopes, after return statements, everywhere. You’re probably thinking about

  const foo = function (){}

without its own name before (). These behave like expressions and cannot be hoisted.

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Re:Greppability is an underrated code metric by MetaWhirledPeas on Tuesday September 03, 2024 @10:55AM (#41435559)

> I use post-definitions of utility functions all the time in file scopes, function scopes, after return statements, everywhere

I haven't figured out if people consider this a best practice, but I love doing it. To me the list of called functions is a high-level explanation of the code, and listing all the definitions first just buries the high-level logic "below the fold". Immediately diving into function contents outside of their broader context is confusing to me.

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Re:Greppability is an underrated code metric by wruza on Tuesday September 03, 2024 @11:29AM (#41435910)

I don’t monitor “best” practices, so beware. But in languages like C and Pascal I also had a habit of simply declaring all interfaces at the top and then grouping implementations reasonably. It also created a nice “index” of what’s in the file.

Hoisting also enables cross-imports without helper unit extraction headaches. Many hate js/ts at the “kids hate == and null” level but in reality these languages have a very practical design that wins so many rounds irl.

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