The Daily WTF

For every leftpad debacle, there are a thousand “utility belt” libraries for JavaScript. Whether it’s the “venerable” JQuery, or lodash, or maybe Google’s Closure library, there’s a pile of things that usually end up in a 50,000 line util.js file available for use, and packaged up a little more cleanly.

Dan B had a co-worker who really wanted to start using Closure. But they also wanted to be “abstract”, and “loosely coupled”, so that they could swap out implementations of these utility functions in the future.

This meant that they wrote a lot of code like:

initech.util.clamp = function(value, min, max) { return goog.math.clamp(value, min, max); }

But it wasn’t enough to just write loads of functions like that. This co-worker “knew” they’d need to provide their own implementations for some methods, reflecting how the utility library couldn’t always meet their specific business needs.

Unfortunately, Dan noticed

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