Mike Horen

I fully agree. Although I'm not a mobile developer a lot of this carries over to what I do. The more moving parts you have the more potential places errors can occur. It's surprising how much you can get a accomplished with very little code. My thoughts are it should be clean, simple and it should just work.

This is pretty sick, nice trick

I agree with the author in that you avoid a lot of potential hoisting errors and your code generally looks cleaner. Additionally if your team consistently declares at the top you always know where to look for the declarations instead of having to search the code. To nitpick from a performance standpoint it is however more performant to use var for each declaration based on my latest tests (4ms to 8ms over 10m loops - Firefox). I personally using one var statement/comma delimited though because it reads cleaner.