“They” say that you should take small steps when refactoring. Super small steps at first. Then as you become more comfortable with the pace and are more confident in your ability to do specific refactorings, you tend to start taking bigger steps. And if you have some trouble…back off the changes and take smaller steps. I was doing a refactoring last night and I took too big of a step. It took me an hour to finally back off and take smaller steps. I was SO confident in the code I’d written that I was refusing to accept it was flawed. Once I backed off it took one test to find the culprit:
$A = function(){
var arr = new Array();
for(var i=0;i<arguments.length;i++){
var currArr = arguments[i];
for(var j=0;j<currArr.length;j++){
arr[i+j] = currArr[j];
}
}
return arr;
}
That logic (problem part colored in red) made perfect sense to me…in my defense I was on my third glass of wine 
This is basically prototype’s function that ‘casts’ the provided object to an array. This one supports passing multiple iterable objects (any object with a length property whose members are index-accessible) and it will effectively concatenate them. There is a concat method on an array object, and I’d love to just use that, but you can’t pass the ‘arguments’ variable to the array ‘concat’ method…and that is what I needed to do.) I could have just used prototype. I really like some of what prototype provides, but (I’m sure this has been said before) I don’t want to pull the whole thing in just for a few of the functions I like. Some folks have the same issue with open source java code, but that isn’t as big an issue to me as the javascript one…anyway that’s another post.
Moral of this story: take smaller steps or drink less wine
