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this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
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Wow, I knew import syntax with a separate
fromstatement could be awkward, but that's a new one for me.Apparently, the
*cannot be used to import all symbols underneath a module (you always have to specify theas moduleName), so I guess, that makes it somewhat less weird for referring to the module itself.From what I can tell, there's also no obvious other keyword they could've used:
packageis only a keyword in strict mode.selfis not a keyword.thisis kind of awkward.import as operations from "Math";).import from "Math" as operations;).So, I guess, I'll allow it, but I'm still not happy about it...
You mean I can't just
And be done with it? How inefficient!
Calm down Thanos
JavaScript was a mistake, but this is one of the few things they did correctly. Implicitly importing everything from a package into the current scope makes it difficult to follow where variables or functions come from, and it's prone to cause problems when two packages export the same identifier.
If you're an absolute masochist, there's always a workaround. Against all best practices, you can use the deprecated with statement. Or, you can
Object.assign()the packages into the global object like a monster. Or if you're using node, you can use thenode:vmmodule to create a new V8 context with its own global object of your choosing.Oh yeah, I was merely complaining about the syntax. Coming from other languages, I interpreted that import statement to mean essentially this:
...and as such, it took me a few seconds to understand what's being aliased by
as operations.As for importing all symbols of a module, I do think it's more harm than good in non-compiled languages. But when it comes to compiled languages, I'd say it depends on the language.
In Rust, for example, I can easily throw down an inline module with one-way isolation, so that it can transparently access everything in its parent module via
use super::*;, while the parent module can't access what's in the module (unless it's been markedpub). That can reduce mental complexity of the code (and is actually used a lot, because unit tests are typically put into such an inline module).It's also useful in Rust, because you can re-export symbols in different modules, so you can break up a file without breaking the imports by throwing a
pub use my_sub_module::*;into the original module.But yeah, on the flipside, I really wouldn't miss it, if it didn't exist in Java. It was rather even annoying, because the popular IDEs have a rule to replace explicit imports with an asterisk as soon as it reached 5 symbols imported from the same module.
It's not as bad as one might think, because you can't declare top-level functions or variables in Java (everything has to be in a class), but it still sometimes led to those asterisk imports bringing in the wrong class names, so I'd have to manually add the import I wanted underneath them...