When Not to Use Javascript Arrow Functions

ES6 Arrow Functions

Love at first sight <3! Who doesn’t love the simplicity of them? Introduced as part of the ECMAScript 6, arrow functions went viral, and we all know why. The new syntax to declare functions is wonderful, saving us time and enhancing clarity in many situations, removing all the distracting, unnecessary, chunk that usually came with declaring a JS function.

Let’s take an example of a regular function declaration, and the same function using arrow functions:

function wecolme() {
  return "Welcome!"
}

And with ES6 Arrow Functions

const welcome = () => "Welcome!"

Not evident enough? Let’s look at another example:

const f = list.map(function(item) { return item; })

vs

const f = list.map((item) => item)

Ain’t that beautiful?

However, we need to be careful, as the differences between the 2 declarations are not just syntax, and thus it cannot be applied in every situation. Let’s now take a look at situations under which using Arrow Functions is not the right way.

Object Methods

Take a look at the following example:

const article = {
  claps: 0,
  clap: () => {
    this.claps++;
  }
}

In this example, it would be intuitive to think that every time we call article.clap() the attribute article.claps would increase by one, initially from 0 to 1. However, this is not the case, the value of claps will sadly remain the same and this article will never get to be popular.

Since this author doesn’t like that idea, let’s see why this doesn’t work. The problem, as usual, is with this and scoping.

As MDN states:

An arrow function expression is a syntactically compact alternative to a regular function expression, although without its own bindings to the this, arguments, super, or new.target keywords. Arrow function expressions are ill suited as methods, and they cannot be used as constructors.

meaning that in our case, the enclosed scope would be the window object. Invoking the method clap() would simply attempt to increment the property claps on the window object.

However, if instead, we use the traditional syntax:

const article = {
  claps: 0,
  clap: function() {
    this.claps++;
  }
}

Live Example:

Object Prototype

Similar to the example above, object prototypes will evaluate this as the window object, like in the following example:

class Article {
  constructor(title) {
    this.title = title;
    this.shared = false;
  }
};

Article.prototype.share = () => {
  return this.shared = true;
};

Similarly, to the previous case the method share() won’t work due to the enclosed scope to the window object. And again the solution will look familiar:

Article.prototype.share2 = function() {
  return this.shared = true;
};

Live Example:

Callback functions with dynamic context

In the next example we will take a look at the dynamic context in callbacks, like those in events:

var button = document.getElementById('press');
button.addEventListener('click', () => {
  this.classList.toggle('worked');
});

Again the similarities with previous examples are obvious, can you guess what the issue is? And you are right, same as before the enclosed scope is affecting the meaning of this.

Live Example:

A way to workaround a solution (thanks to michaelbiberich for the tip) is to use an arrow function and use the event object to access the object in that function, however, this does not solve the enclosing of the scope, but it does work for this particular example

var button = document.getElementById('press');
button.addEventListener('click', (e) => {
  e.target.classList.toggle('worked');
});

Makes the code less readable

Sometimes the use of arrow functions will make the code unreadable, not very likely but can happen, don’t use them then. The idea behind it is to make our code clearer, so make sure it stays that way.

ES6 introduced many great ideas, and arrow functions are one of them. Now we know when we shouldn’t use arrow functions, or if something funny is happening with our code we might get an idea of what could be wrong.

Thanks for reading! and share it if you liked it!