Expired packages

At several points in the Complete Web Developer course, deprecated packages have been used, with the slide before the video explaining what’s happening, and giving a work around, or sometimes - as is the case for the bit I’m just starting - exhorting the benefits of dropping you into a non-working mess and having you figure it out yourself.

While this argument can be reasonably made - that figuring things out on your own is a valuable skill - it’s also a useful fig leaf to cover up the fact that they haven’t bothered to fix the course to make it work out of the box.

CWD - 185 - Problem solving

/* 
Question 1: Clean the room function: given an input of [1,2,4,591,392,391,2,5,10,2,1,1,1,20,20], 
make a function that organizes these into individual array that is ordered. For example 
answer(ArrayFromAbove) should return: [[1,1,1,1],[2,2,2], 4,5,10,[20,20], 391, 392,591]. 
*/

function ctrFunction1(inputArray) {
    //  copy the array since we're mutating it
    const array = [...inputArray];
    array.sort();

    const numberObject = {};
    for (const number of array) {
        if (numberObject[number] === undefined) {
            // this property does not exist, so add it
            numberObject[number] = [];
        }
        numberObject[number].push(number);
    }

    // object now contains arrays for each number, but the ones with a
    // single element need degloved
    for (property in numberObject) {
        if (numberObject[property].length === 1) {
            numberObject[property] = numberObject[property][0];
        }
    }

    // now turn back to array 
    return Object.values(numberObject);
}

const array1 = [1, 2, 4, 591, 392, 391, 2, 5, 10, '2', 1, 1, 1, 20, 20];
const transformedArray1 = ctrFunction1(array1);
console.log(transformedArray1);
// [1, 1, 1, 1], [2, 2, '2'], 4, 5, 10, [20, 20], 391, 392, 591]

Line 10

When I’m looking at a function, I’d prefer not to also have to hold global state in my head - so I’m all for functional programming as far as that goes. I’m less concerned about side effects, so I wouldn’t always bother to copy a parameter like this, but the argument is stronger for an array than an object since in other languages an array might be a value type.

Step Ahead

I was a bit pleased with myself when I started the next content element in the Complete Web Developer course to find that one and a half of the extensions I’d made to the tutorial app for my own fun were specified as the next task.

In my previous post, I’d talked about using a class to denote if an item was completed, and using a style to indicate this by crossing it out. What I haven’t discussed was that I’d captured right click events on the list items to make this delete them. I wasn’t entirely happy with that for a couple of reasons: