Creating maintainable JavaScript code is important if want to keep using the code.

In this article, we’ll look at the basics of creating maintainable JavaScript code by looking at avoiding changing objects we don’t own.

Don’t Remove Methods

Removing methods from objects we didn’t create is also easy.

For instance, we can write:

document.getElementById = null;

Then we made document.getElementById null .

Now getElementById is no longer a function.

So we can’t call it.

Also, we cal delete properties with the delete operator.

delete operator works on regular objects, so we can write:

let person = {
  name: "james"
};
delete person.name;

and we remove the name property, so person.name would be undefined .

However, this operator has no effect on built-in library methods.

So if we write:

delete document.getElementById

that has no effect.

Removing existing methods is definitely a bad practice.

Developers expect the object to have methods described in the library documentation.

And existing code may be using the methods since everyone expected them to be there.

If we want to remove a method, then we should deprecate them so that they won’t be used for new code and will be removed from the existing code.

Then once they’re all gone, then we can remove it.

Removing would be the very last step.

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