Refactoring old Js code with Ramda.

I am a Technical Lead in the department in my company that writes code for our clients that have money but doesn't have the technical expertise to handle the complexities of our own software.

Part of my tasks involve taking care of a few projects written by employees that have left after using third-party tools rather than using our own software. No one else in this department knows these third-party tools, they only know our own, and my *still limited* web development experience means I get dumped these things in my lap.

And I'm SO pissed at these projects and their authors and the manager that let these ex-employees write these things. There is this one project that was managed by two different "developers" (I don't know they deserve this title) at two different times, and it is so riddled with different technologies it makes me want to throw up almost daily.

Don't believe me? Here is a complete list of the dependencies listed in the package.json of this project: babel-polyfill, body-parser, cookie-parser, debug, edge, edge-sql, excel-to-json, exceljs, express, html-inline, jade, morgan, mssql, mysql, pug, ramda, request, rotating-file-stream, serve-favicon, webpack, xlsx, xml2js

What this doesn't even show, is that one part of this project (literally one page) is made using react, react-dom, react-redux, and jade. The other part (again literally one page) is made using Angular and Pug. In case you missed it while picking up your jaw, there's also mssql, mysql, edge and edge-sql. excel-to-json, exceljs, xlsx.

Oh you want *more* juicy details? This project takes the entire data object used by the front-end, stringifies it into JSON, and shoves it into the database *as a single field*. And instead of doing WHERE clauses in the SQL queries, it grabs the entire table, loops, parses the json, and does a condition on it. If even one of those JSON entries gets corrupted, the entire solution breaks because these "developers" don't know what try/catch is.

The client asked for a very simple change in their app, which was to add a button that queries the back-end for a URL, shows it in a modal dialog, after which a button is clicked to verify the link by doing a second query to the back-end before modifying a couple of fields in the page.

This. Took. Me. Two. Months*. Save me. Please, save me.

*between constant context switches between this and other projects that were continuously failing because of their mistakes.

Today there was a question on the react native forum asking how to map an array..... ([].map(mapFunction))

1) it's the wrong place for the question

2) like 80% mentioned ramda, lodash, underscore :(

React, it's declarative way of doing things, and the functional programming methodology it prefers.

Realized how much I've moved on from for-loops and class/object instance to maps, filters and immutability/observers when I worked on a Laravel project after so long and found myself forced to do things in the, erm, "PHP" way, despite spending my initial year and a half of programming working exclusively in PHP.

Sure, there's Class Components and imperative techniques in React but I had blissfully settled into using the flexible nature of doing things enabled by both native JS and React, with hooks, Lodash/Ramda and (almost fanatically) pure functions

I'm working with a nice piece of code written 6 years ago by somebody who isn't in the company anymore and only the fact that they live on the other side of the continent prevents me from physically strangling them.

They must have thought that they were very smart trying to use JavaScript as a functional language. A shitload of library-specific decorators that ultimately don't do shit except for raising the cognitive load of anybody who hasn't worked with it before. Why the fuck did you use 'curry' in a function that then is never called in a functional manner? Because fuck me, go check the documentation of ramda because you obviously have too much time at work if you ask questions, just to learn fuck all.

It fascinates me how people take this steaming pile of shit that is JavaScript and then try to work against all its design assumptions to create something that is even more slimy, disgusting and smelly. It shows a radical misunderstanding of what you're even working with.

Take shit, add straw and you might have a docent construction material. Take shit, sprinkle it with chilli and try to eat it and it's just hot shit. But at least you will make everyone else try to find out why the fuck is that chilli in there because why would you expect it there. I'm a coprologist, not a cook.

I see you've gone ahead and decided to code this part using Ramda library + point free style. Let's go around and make 4 other developers learn it real quick.

Today I submitted to code review the first iteration of a microservice done with Ramda and flow by request of my collegues. This is the first time they look at anything similar to functional code or typed js, and only one of them took the time to actually do a review.

I really like having my code reviewed and reviewing others', but please don't pester me to make a PR for a microservice you'll never look only to bail off as soon as you see something new that scares you. Buckle up and learn new stuff!