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  • Thought about const

Thought about const

# Cyril Auburtin (8 years ago)

After a year of using const, I got used to it, but even with that I often feel losing time using it, with those 2 additional chars. It's really unfortunate because it's by far the most frequently used for variables assignments.

It's also really close to console(.log,...), annoying with auto-completers

Thing are probably frozen at this time, but cst, ref, val would have been interesting

# Wes Garland (8 years ago)

How often do you type const in a day?

Saving 2 characters will save you 250ms assuming you are a decent keyboardist.

I'll trade 250ms of typing for clarity any day.

Wes

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 28, 2016, at 08:00, Cyril Auburtin <cyril.auburtin at gmail.com> wrote:

After a year of using const, I got used to it, but even with that I often feel losing time using it, with those 2 additional chars. It's really unfortunate because it's by far the most frequently used for variables assignments.

It's also really close to console(.log,...), annoying with auto-completers

Thing are probably frozen at this time, but cst, ref, val would have been interesting

# Michael Theriot (8 years ago)

I also thought cst would have been good. My petty issue is that when declaring variables all of my constants have a different indentation.

I define all of my arrow functions with const so I use it fairly often.

# kdex (8 years ago)

I use const by default as well, but I don't think saving two characters is worth giving up readability. Newcomers might even think that "ungrammatical" abbreviations such as cst could stand for cast, constructor or similar terms related to programming.

In terms of hindsight, it could have been great if let could have been our const, and something like let mut or let mutable or even mut or mutable could have been our let. Defaulting to values being constant and making them mutable explicitly would be an approach that, for instance, Rust followed.

Anyway, we're stuck with it now, and if typing const takes too much time, consider creating a keyboard macro that types in const for you. ;)

# Alexander Jones (8 years ago)

One day, there will be a language where changing stuff like this is actually viable, with projectional editing, casting code to whichever vocabulary and grammar is en vogue... :)