Cognitive Complexity

Cognitive Complexity is a measure of how difficult a unit of code is to intuitively understand. Unlike Cyclomatic Complexity, which determines how difficult your code will be to test, Cognitive Complexity tells you how difficult your code will be to read and comprehend.

A method's cognitive complexity is based on a few simple rules:

• Code is not considered more complex when it uses shorthand that the language provides for collapsing multiple statements into one
• Code is considered more complex for each "break in the linear flow of the code"
• Code is considered more complex when "flow breaking structures are nested"

Further reading

• Cognitive Complexity docs
• Cognitive Complexity: A new way of measuring understandability

Disallow Functions in Loops (no-loop-func)

Writing functions within loops tends to result in errors due to the way the function creates a closure around the loop. For example:

for (var i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
    funcs[i] = function() {
        return i;
    };
}

In this case, you would expect each function created within the loop to return a different number. In reality, each function returns 10, because that was the last value of i in the scope.

let or const mitigate this problem.

/*eslint-env es6*/

for (let i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
    funcs[i] = function() {
        return i;
    };
}

In this case, each function created within the loop returns a different number as expected.

Rule Details

This error is raised to highlight a piece of code that may not work as you expect it to and could also indicate a misunderstanding of how the language works. Your code may run without any problems if you do not fix this error, but in some situations it could behave unexpectedly.

Examples of incorrect code for this rule:

/*eslint no-loop-func: "error"*/
/*eslint-env es6*/

for (var i=10; i; i--) {
    (function() { return i; })();
}

while(i) {
    var a = function() { return i; };
    a();
}

do {
    function a() { return i; };
    a();
} while (i);

let foo = 0;
for (let i=10; i; i--) {
    // Bad, function is referencing block scoped variable in the outer scope.
    var a = function() { return foo; };
    a();
}

Examples of correct code for this rule:

/*eslint no-loop-func: "error"*/
/*eslint-env es6*/

var a = function() {};

for (var i=10; i; i--) {
    a();
}

for (var i=10; i; i--) {
    var a = function() {}; // OK, no references to variables in the outer scopes.
    a();
}

for (let i=10; i; i--) {
    var a = function() { return i; }; // OK, all references are referring to block scoped variables in the loop.
    a();
}

var foo = 100;
for (let i=10; i; i--) {
    var a = function() { return foo; }; // OK, all references are referring to never modified variables.
    a();
}
//... no modifications of foo after this loop ...

Source: http://eslint.org/docs/rules/