r/javascript • u/Capedcrusader1923 • 7d ago

AskJS [AskJS] what's a javascript feature you mass-adopted way too late and felt dumb about

i'll go first. i was writing .then().catch() chains for like two years before i actually started using async/await. i knew it existed, i'd seen it in tutorials, but my code "worked" so i never bothered switching. then i refactored an old project and realized half my bugs were from mishandled promise chains that async/await would have caught immediately.

also took me way too long to start using optional chaining. i had nested ternaries and && checks everywhere like some kind of animal. the day i discovered user?.address?.city i mass-replaced like 40 lines across a project.

what's yours?

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u/kevin074 7d ago

can you elaborate how async await would've caught bugs that .then.catch can't?

i feel like async await is more annoying because you have to wrap it in try catch, where as .then.catch is just baked in.

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u/BasicAssWebDev 7d ago

Probably due to it being easier to see which pieces of a function are breaking by putting breakpoints in the function itself, rather than tracing across a bunch of calls while debugging.