one of the cases something like this is useful for is when you have user configured saved 'filters' - you can simply pass the stored object into the where clause. I agree if you're doing hard-coded queries on arrays of objects, this may not add a lot. That said, a consistent syntax for doing searches and mapping is useful - projects like lodash have that as part of their api too.
This is actually a pretty decent use case for something like this. You could technically convert a user provided filter function to a string to serialize it, then recreate it using the Function() constructor, but that requires adding 'unsafe-eval' to your content security policy [1][2].
Why is that not good? JavaScript is full of layers of unnecessary abstraction often for completely superficial reasons and sometimes even irrationally applied at great cost in defiance of evidence and simplicity. So, what makes this specific example less good than all the other countless examples of abstractions most JavaScript developers would happily die to defend?
because in the past it didn't have those functional constructors so things like underscore or lodash would be needed but adding a layer as you mentioned. It is not good, for me, to add a dependency for this again. But in the end I have in my utils file a few functions that basically do what JAQT does and I might copy a few more.
jQuery provided a DOM manipulation API that was the same in all browsers when there were lots of differences between browser implementations. While you could do everything using standard web APIs, that would be incredibly error prone and tedious at a time when `querySelector` was not a thing yet.
Lodash does way more than some basic functional wrappers. I've seen too many buggy re-implementations of debounce, throttle and groupBy at this point, it's not even funny.
Life without jQuery was never as hard as you claim. jQuery broke in IE9 more than it helped, but it was also a cult and many developers were entirely unemployable without it.
This is such a weirdly contrarian take. You’re basically saying that everything in context is terrible, and somehow at the same time, on the same basis, that it’s wrong to critique anything because everything is terrible.
That’s certainly a logically consistent position, but it isn’t one that allows much room for anything to improve… or even become a productive discussion.
No, I am saying don't complain about something only because its an abstraction when likely the person making that comment cannot program without vanity abstractions. Clearly, this is about bias and preference. At the very least people could be consistent in their reasoning.
The critique was that the existing abstractions address the same set of problems as do the newly introduced abstractions. You’ve said that the existing abstractions are bad, as an invalidation of that critique.
It is perfectly reasonable to ask whether something for convenience adds value to something also for convenience.
Nearly everything in any high level language isn’t strictly necessary to achieve general purpose computation. That doesn’t invalidate any distinction between all higher level concepts! They specifically add expressiveness, so it’s eminently meaningful—for people who find expressiveness valuable—to discuss and distinguish between like solutions in those terms.
I never said any of this is bad. I said it is completely unnecessary. Those are different. I also said the blind reliance on that unnecessary stuff is foolish. Like you said it is all about convenience, which is exceedingly shallow and faulty.
> They specifically add expressiveness
Not really. Expressiveness is the ability to achieve the same end state in different ways. How do you then determine that? You have to count the different ways a given thing is achieved. Under the abstraction if its doing the same thing in the same way as something else then its not really different, and thus not expressive. That is why these large SPA frameworks have wildly different super large APIs, but their output is strikingly similar, which isn't expressive at all. Really, with these tools none of that matters, because its really just about the perceptions of convenience.
This is a discussion forum, you know? Different people, different opinions. You can go ahead and use JAQT which I found fine but I prefer to avoid adding external dependencies. I hope it doesn't hurt your feelings too much but the good thing is that you can continuing using JS the way you like.
Author here, if you are comfortable with filter/map/reduce, than JAQT doesn't provide much benefits, I agree. My target audience is developers who aren't that used to that. I've had much more success with junior developers using JAQT, then trying to get them to use map/reduce.
data.filter(d => d.friends.includes("John")).map(d => ({name: d.name+" "+d.lastName}))
Maybe I'm missing the bigger picture, but that doesn't seem so bad