backbone? magic? backbone is 1534 lines of straightforward, well written, well documented javascript. backbone is about as simple and un-magic as MVC gets, by design.
I feel stuff like this takes a lot of mental power to understand the context that it is being executed in and what exactly it is doing. It feels like I am knee deep in some obfuscated C code.
It's not that hard when you know the idioms. && is a guard and || is a default. With a little bit more context and experience in writing concise javascript, it's actually pretty clean.
I wouldn't go so far as to say this is horrible code, I also wouldn't say this is good refactored code.
It definitely gets the job done; however, I would imagine someone figures they'll come back and refactor at some point. Code is never finished, it is merely shipped. This is shipping code, but it certainly can be refactored into a more intention revealing function.
It's a trade-off. If you pull it into a new function, it adds LOC. It also is another layer of abstraction. Is it worth it? Perhaps...but maybe not. Just looking at this one line of code in isolation without context is a bit unfair though.
I understood what pjax was doing in about 5 minutes. Backbone.js is more complicated than that, and while I'm certain it's not that hard to figure out, I felt a bit like "ok, it's doing stuff I don't immediately understand, but it's also not doing any deep magic that makes difficult things super-easy, either". Very subjective, but it just didn't feel like a sweet spot. Angular.js actually seemed like more of an "all-in" play with the fancy stuff, but that datepicker issue was a wake up call about getting to a point where even doing something simple might be quite difficult.
Backbone and pjax are not similar so maybe the issue is picking the right tool for the right project. PJax is great if you are looking to help navigate. Backbone is useful with managing objects and collections while keeping them separate from the DOM. It also provides its router to coexist with its views.
you aren't the only one. i too went through troubles and concerns when i started venturing out to use some of the plugins out there, notably datepicker, select2, jqmodal, actually just about any other "cool" plugins out there. creating your own directives to get something to work is something i'd just rather stay away from.
Exactly. If you run into something beyond the docs in Backbone you can just step through the code and see what's happening. It seems to do just enough without drowning you in "other people's code".
