phase_9

For me; one of the "joys" of coding JavaScript is the expressiveness that comes with a dynamic languages; should you throw an ArgumentError when your function that expects a number is invoked with a String? Maybe - sure it can help catch problems early and effectively "stop-the-line" in your public API, but then again it will probably end up throwing the classic `TypeError: Object foo has no method 'bar'` for you anyway.

For "public" methods which form part of an API (especially when that API is going to be shared outside of my team) I try to make my functions handle failure early (before they delegate off to the "private" internal methods), even better if the public methods can repair any unexpected usage, ie:

  function convertToHex(value) {
    var result;
    
    if (typeof value !== "number") {
      result = convertToHex(parseInt(value, 10));
    }
    else {
      result = "0x" + value.toString(16);
    }
    
    return result;
  }

  function doFoo(bar) {
    bar = (bar !== undefined) ? bar : "default_value";
  }