Mastering Modular JavaScript

Chapter 4. Shaping Internals

Thus far we’ve addressed modular design and API design concerns from a high-level perspective, but avoided plunging into the deep end of implementation details. In contrast, this chapter is devoted to advice and concrete actions we can take to improve the quality of our component implementations. We’ll discuss complexity, ways to remediate it, the perils of state, and how to better leverage data structures.

4.1 Internal Complexity

Every piece of code we write is a source of internal complexity, with the potential to become a large pain point for our codebase as a whole. That said, most bits of code are relatively harmless when compared to the entire corpus of our codebase, and trying to proof our code against complexity is a sure way of increasing complexity for no observable benefit. The question is, then, how do we identify the small problems before they grow into a serious threat to the maintainability of our project?

Making a conscious effort to track pieces of code that we haven’t changed or interacted with in a while, and identifying whether they’re simple enough to understand can help us determine whether refactoring may be in order. We could, perhaps, set a rule whereby team members should watch out for garden paths in the codebase and fix them as they are making changes in the same functional area as the affected code. When we track complexity methodically, often, and across the entire team that’s responsible for a codebase, we ...