Not a lot of engineers feel comfortable programming without writing loops. I get it. Loops feel like control. But the more asynchronous programming you do, the more you realize you often do not need them. You start thinking in flows instead of steps. You lean on map, filter, forEach, for...of, promises, streams, and events. That shift quietly changes how you see problems. A function that recommends movies in a Netflix-like app and a function that handles drag and drop interactions look totally different on the surface. But structurally, they are cousins. Both consume a stream of inputs over time and produce outputs as reactions. Same shape, different domain. I think we inherited a confusing mental model. Iterators and observers were described as separate ideas. Events and arrays were treated like unrelated concepts. In practice, they are closer than we think. Arrays are finite data streams. Events are potentially infinite data streams. The real missing piece in older JavaScript was a clean way to say, "this stream is done, no more data is coming." Async iterators quietly fixed that. The code snippet below is a small example that treats events like an async iterable and lets you use for...of instead of a callback. No need for manual loops with counters or nested callbacks. Just a stream of values you can consume like an array. Once you start seeing arrays, events, API responses, user behavior, and real-time data as the same abstract thing, streams of values over time, your code gets simpler, and your architecture gets sharper. #JavaScript #AsyncProgramming #SoftwareEngineering #Frontend #Programming
Ihor Shevchuk
3mo
Lol, just lol.
You know that map, reduce, forEach, etc are loops too, but slower and uncontrollable, dont you?