In my line of work, I edit a lot of legacy code, and with that I see a lot of the following:
That little piece of code is actually a really bad way of doing things, and (to me) is illustrative of when someone is working in Javascript and doesn’t actually know what they’re doing.
For those who don’t know (and would like to learn), setTimeout (and its sister, setInterval) can accept a string of code to be executed as an argument. Know what other method takes a string of code and executes it? eval() does. Generally, methods like these should be avoided, as they leave ways for arbitrary scripts to run if you’re not careful.
So how could the above code be improved? Take the following:
What’s important to remember here is that *everything* in Javascript is an object. This may seem like grade school material, but it’s surprising how many people miss it – since our function (foo) is an object, we can point to it like any other object. What we’re essentially doing now is, instead of telling setTimeout “hey, evaluate this script after this timer expires”, just “run this function when this timer expires”. There’s no need to invoke eval() for such a simple operation.
But what about my arguments?
Yes, you can still pass arguments with this form. Whereas before you’d make up a whole string to be executed, you’d now just run it with an anonymous function. For those of you using jQuery, this should feel very familiar:
Javascript is incredibly flexible. If you’re going to work in it, take the time to actually understand what’s going on. You (and your users) will be better off for it.