Sure. But in a sane language doing something totally nonsensical like that is an error, and in a statically typed language it’s a compiler error. It doesn’t just silently do weird shit.

Onfuscators probably use it though, so no spec ever will be able to get rid of this crap.

Yup. The libraries underneath will still allow nonsense at runtime, though, and it will now be harder to see, so it's a partial solution as done in standard practice.

An all-TypeScript stack, if you could pull it off, would be the way to go.

By that logic what we really need is a modernization of Ada, where there are no compiler warnings and anything that would generate one in another language is instead a compiler error, everything is strongly typed, etc, etc.

If you aren't familiar with Ada, just imagine Pascal went to military school.

I come back to watch this every few years. It's so good!

How do I know so little about programming yet this is still so funny?

Maybe the neuroscientists have some insight:

mfw non-commutativeness

The inspector REPL evaluates as a statement-with-value (like eval), so the {} at the beginning is considered an empty block, not an object. This leaves +[], which is 0. I don't know what would make Node differ, however.

Edit: Tested it myself. It seems Node prefers evaluating this as an expression when it can, but explicitly using eval gives the inspector behavior:

You don't necessarily need types for that kind of thing though, a strict linter that flags that code works just as well

Mandatory link

I take this as less of a "I can't use this intuitive feature reliably" thing and more of a "the truth table will bite you in the ass when you least expect it and/or make a mistake" thing.

It's not even the coercion that is the problem here. The types are already bad by themselves.

I've read different defenses for JavaScript for cases like this, which usually runs somewhere from you shouldn't be doing that anyway all the way up to if you just understood the language better you'd know why. While I agree with both of those points strongly as general principles, JavaScript also violates the principle of least surprise enough to make it concerning.

For what it's worth, I do like JavaScript. I really don't think that there is any perfect programming language.