Hi, I'm new-ish to web dev, by way of web design, by way of graphic design, so I have a lot to learn. I think maybe I'm missing something re template literals. consider:

return '<h1>Hello ' + firstName + ', welcome to your account.</h1>';

and

return `<h1>Hello '${ firstName }', welcome to your account.</h1>`;

Ok, so you're typing 1 less char, is that the only benefit? Are there performance benefits? It's certainly not significantly more legible or anything. What's the use case where template literals are just far and away superior to plain old string concat?

EDIT: Thanks everyone, I feel like I know when and how to use template literals now.

I have a server that uses the chat gpt api with stream (SSE) and I have to concatenate all the chucks it sends.

I wanted to know if there is something more efficient than +=, in other languages they recommend using a String Buffer, in js/ts I don't know what is best.

Thank you so much.

async function main() {
  const stream = await openai.chat.completions.create({
    model: 'gpt-4',
    messages: [{ role: 'user', content: 'Say this is a test' }],
    stream: true,
  });
  for await (const part of stream) {
    process.stdout.write(part.choices[0]?.delta?.content || '');
  }
}

I've been working on a project at work and one of the guys that was there before me and supposedly a senior web developer created a whole application with dynamically generated HTML code which looks something like this:

var name = 'Bob';
var text = [];

text.push('Hello ');
text.push(name);
text.push(" how's your day going?");
text.push('My day is going fine thanks ');
text.push(name);

text = text.join('');

Which completely baffled me. I would've thought it was cleaner and more readable to simply do:

var text = '';
var name = 'Bob';

text += 'Hello ' + name + " how's your day going?";
text += 'My day is going fine thanks ' + name;

Is there any reason for using the join() or concatenating the strings like that? I created a jsFiddle and it appears using the array and join() method is 3 times slower.