Why "_this" and not "that"

[airbnb]

Why "_this" and not "that"

[spikebrehm]

Haha, good question. This is a side effect of the conversion of the Rendr source code from CoffeeScript to JavaScript. There is still cleanup that can happen to make it read more like human-written JS. I'm fine with that, and also it may be possible to avoid the alias altogether for certain calls, by either passing in this as the context as the last argument, or by using Function.prototype.bind:

someArray.map(function(element) {
  ...
}, this);

this.app.on('someEvent', function() {

}, this);

doSomething(function() }
  this.someMethod();
  ...
}.bind(this));

[hshoff]

There are 2 reasons behind using _this over that.

The big one for us is we've used CoffeeScript for some larger projects and CoffeeScript compiles this aliases to _this. We wanted to protect ourselves in the event we decide to ditch the CoffeeScript files and move forward with the compiled JS source. This helps with consistency with the rest of the JS in our codebase.

The other reason is readability. Our team agreed on _this being the easier reference to understand when you jump into a larger JS project opposed to trying to track down the that assignment.

The important part for any large JS codebase with lots of folks working on the project is consistency. So If your team decides "that" is easier to read and everyone already uses it. That's fine. Just go with what's best for everyone.

This is another example of why I named our style guide "A Mostly Reasonable Approach to JavaScript"

[spikebrehm]

Oops @amiorin, I had just assumed that this issue was opened on the airbnb/rendr project. Excuse the nonsensical answer.