Fake chain pattern

I have recently read “Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns” and since the idea of pattern is fresh in my mind, I want to share a function naming trick that I use many times.

In one of my toy projects I have recently come to the problem of writing a JS function to find the “old items” in a list of “current items”. So I have:

var oldItems = [1, 2, 3];
var currentItems = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5];

and I need a function that would tell me which of the current items are new. First question that comes out is: what do I name it? Then, in which order do I pass the arguments in a way that is obvious which one is which? Maybe it’s because I’m a long-time JavaScripter, but this whole idea felt somewhat unnatural…

If I step back and think about this problem, it’s about two subjects—the current and previous lists—so it seems more intuitive to think of this as two actions: find the item in one and then check if it exists in the other. Here is what I came up with:

var newItems = itemsIn(currentItems).thatExistIn(oldItems);

This fake chain is pretty easy to implement in JS, but from the use point of view is a lot better. The combination of the two function names clearly tells what’s going to happen, and I don’t even have to think about which list to pass where.

A similar approach is used by Jasmine testing framework:

expect(message).toMatch(/bar/);

which reads pretty well too. In my case the implementation is pretty simple:

function itemsIn(currentItems) {
  return {
    thatExistIn: function(oldItems) {
      // here I have both lists
    }
  };
};

It may feel a bit unnatural if you’re not too fond of JavaScript, but I find it makes for really readable client code.

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