Lesson 12. New object literal syntax
After reading lesson 12, you will
- Know how to use shorthand property names
- Know how to use shorthand method names
- Know how to use computed property names
I don’t think there’s anything as ubiquitous in JavaScript as the object literal. They’re everywhere. With a tool that’s used so frequently, any conveniences can have a huge net positive on productivity. Three syntactic additions to object literals introduced in ES2015 make them much more of a pleasure to read and write. You don’t gain new functionality, but having code that’s easy to read and write, especially when it comes to maintenance, is just as important a feature.
Consider this
Look at the following object literal. What parts seem redundant? If you were writing a JavaScript-aware string compression engine, what parts do you think you could safely remove while still being able to reconstruct the original object?
Before ES6 there were countless times when I would inevitably create an object literal that had a key or property whose name was the same as the variable I was assigning to it: