What Color is Your Function? (2015)

I really don't like this article. It has a catchy, profound-sounding title that people bandy about to argue against stuff they don't like. All functions, even non-async functions, are colored. In any large system codebase you'll have functions that can only be called in certain situations, with the right setup, whatever, and if you're lucky this is communicated by types but regardless those restrictions can't be avoided. It's easy to call low-restriction functions from high-restriction ones and not the other…

See also this reply: The Function Colour Myth (https://lukasa.co.uk/2016/07/The_Function_Colour_Myth/).

I've always found the criticism leveled by the colored functions blog post a bit contrived. Yes, when you replace the words async/await with meaningless concepts I do not care about such as color, it's very annoying to have to arbitrarily mark a function as blue or red. But when you're honest with yourself and interpret the word "async" as "expensive", or as "does network calls", it becomes clear that "async/await" makes important features of your function explicit, rather than implicit…

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8984648 (410 points, 29 days ago, 143 comments)