

Properties: The New Variables - bkardell
http://briankardell.wordpress.com/2012/06/28/properties-the-new-variables/

======
po
I'll admit I'm not very familiar with the original draft proposal and I
appreciate the intentions and the desire to make it a bit more accessible to
pragmatic people but please indulge me on a little rant here:

I could not dislike the 'my-' prefix any more. Can we please as an industry of
professionals decide to talk about things without having to baby talk it into
a who's-on-first routine? Talking about variables in the first person
possessive is difficult when the 'person' we are talking about owning it is an
abstract block of code. In this proposal it is 'author defined' but really
when I read your code, It is yours… and now it's mine… or maybe it's ours. Or
perhaps it belongs to that block of code. What doesn't change is that it's a
variable (or property).

I know that's probably a minor point but it annoys me.

Secondly, I think the $() syntax needs to be weighed against the cost of
having nesting there. Is $ not enough to indicate a reference? I guess the
idea is to use that to provide a default but I don't like having to always
type out the parens for it.

~~~
bkardell
A link to the draft in github is in the article so fork, send a pull, suggest
away. I would suggest a read through the variables draft and a search on hn
and www-style list to see the previous confusion caused by using not just the
word variable, but the prefix var- and non-paren form you suggest.

~~~
po
I hope it doesn't come off as too harsh. I mean it in a good-natured way and
obviously you're putting forward your ideas which is a good thing.

Why do you think the term 'variable' is the source of confusion and 'property'
is better? If so, why not use a 'prop-' prefix?

~~~
bkardell
No, not at all. We considered lots of things that could work: prop, map,
author, def, store...

The more discussion and argument the better IMO.

------
wanderer
I want to agree with po from an entirely different point of view--a non-
programmer often trying to figure out how a particular program (in a language
I don't know) works. If I spot the "my" or "my-" prefix, I take it that the
corresponding token (e.g. "mypref", "my-limit") is not a reserved term of the
language, but one the programmer is defining or assigning. So the "my" prefix
can be helpful (at least to some non-programmers) and I don't want it co-opted
to become a reserved word.

~~~
bkardell
Just for complete clairty, my-* does in fact indicate a token that the
author/programmer is defining (a custom property), in the same way that data-*
properties do in HTML, which is why my-* was used. But I understand that you
dislike it and I can appreciate why. As I mentioned to Po, the draft is open
on github, and you are free to make better suggestions here as well... I don't
think anyone is particularly married to my- we do know that var- and data-
have caused what we think was unnecessary confusion. Set- was proposed and
denied. What are your thoughts - that's what this is all about. Let's not wind
up with something that people find unintuitive if as a community we can make
it better.

