meaningful-code.md

Write What You Mean

JavaScript is an extremely flexible language, and often there are countless ways to do a particular thing.

You should strive to write code that is indicative of your intentions (read "semantic code"). Here is an example of unclear code.

Eric Elliott has an excellent write-up on the topic of style, naming.

typeof and truthiness

function doWork (options) {
  if (typeof options === 'object' && typeof options.title !== 'undefined') {
    console.log(`title is ${options.title}`)
  }
}

Function arguments are variable declarations: you do not need the safety of typeof to test for its existence. Also, all values in JavaScript except null and undefined are safe to access properties on. In code with variables that might be null, a developer should prefer to test truthiness instead of type unless types need to be distinguished.

The author of this code likely was expecting a non-empty string at options.title object, so a shorter, more meaningful snippet might be:

function doWork (options) {
  if (options && options.title) {
    console.log(`title is ${options.title}`)
  }
}