What The Smoosh Is That?

And What Does It Have To Do With MooTools?

Well, the last 24 hours of my Twitter timeline is full of smoosh and MooTools drama. But what the heck is those things?

Disclaimer: I’m not 100 percent sure of what I have written below. If I tell something wrong, please kindly tell me in the comments below!

Array.prototype.flatten

tc39/proposal-flatMap

Array.prototype.flatten is still a proposal of the ECMAScript. So, there are so many polyfills of it available.

MooTools

MooTools is a collection of JavaScript utilities designed for the intermediate to advanced JavaScript developer. It allows you to write powerful and flexible code with its elegant, well documented, and coherent APIs.

— https://mootools.net

Well, MooTools implemented the aforementioned Array.prototype.flatten. Unfortunately, its implementation is incorrect. (I won’t go into details here.) But the thing you need to know is, MooTools will only patch Array if there isn’t already a flatten function there.

Firefox

Recently, Firefox developers decided that they will implement native Array.prototype.flatten into Firefox. It’s currently in the nightly builds. And because it’s already got native flatten, MooTools decided not to patch it. Well, MooTool’s flatten and Firefox’s flatten are different, so some websites are starting to break.

1443630 - Implementing array.prototype.flatten broke MooTools' version of it.

Here comes the smoosh

So, someone suggested to rename the proposed flatten to smoosh to avoid implementation conflicts.

rename flatten to smoosh by michaelficarra · Pull Request #56 · tc39/proposal-flatMap

And then people started asking: Do we really need to rename it just because of an 8-year-old incorrect implementation? And that’s the starting point for the drama.