Question on serverTimestamp being a function

[akauppi]

Disclaimer: I'm not convinced making serverTimestamp not be a function is a good thing. What do you others think?

---

In the Firebase Firestore 8.x API we do:

FieldValue.serverTimestamp()

I've never stopped to think why that's a function, but now I did, with the @exp API. I somehow expected the parantheses to have been dropped, but they weren't. It's still:

import { serverTimestamp } from 'firebase/firestore'

...

serverTimestamp()

Of the five FieldValues, arrayRemove, arrayUnion and increment need parameters. They are generators for the actual sentinels. serverTimestamp and delete don't have parameters, and I presume there's always the same sentinel returned by them.

This is not a big thing. But.. interfaces also convey the meaning to us humans. To me, exporting the sentinels themselves would make sense, from an interface clarity point of view.

Is there a reason why serverTimestamp needs to be called?

[akauppi]

Related to this, and naming is the delete sentinel function. It used to be used as FieldValue.delete but now dropping the FieldValue makes it a bit too generic, imho.

I'd like to give a better suggestion but cannot.

[schmidt-sebastian]

delete() should already be called deleteField(). Is that still too generic?

[akauppi]

Of course that name is fine. I had not noticed - thanks for correcting me.

How about the subject's question on () or not?

[schmidt-sebastian]

We are discussing that internally. Thanks for bringing it up.