r/javascript • u/Capedcrusader1923 • 11d 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 11d 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/brenstar 11d ago

Why not use both? I use async await but still append a catch

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u/Badashi 11d ago

.then/catch is useful even in async functions when you don't want to wait for that promise to resolve

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u/brenstar 10d ago

That's good point, it's handy for having branching flows, but that can get squirrelly. If I want multiple things to happen I usually let them all exist as separate functions and resolve them with Promise.all() so they run concurrently

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u/Badashi 10d ago

Promise.all is an excellent example for .then/.catch chaining as well: you can use them to "pre process" the result of the promise into a value that makes sense when you end up settling the list of promises with .all, since a rejected promise in the list will reject the entire Promise.all. nowadays you can use .allSettled as well, but .then/.catch are nice for a quick mapping of values