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JavaScript (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

javascript is to web developers what powerpoint is to sales people

[-] [email protected] 0 points 6 days ago

What no type safety does to an MF...

[-] [email protected] 205 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

This is too stupid so I had to check.

Fuck me.

[-] [email protected] 114 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Hm, playing devil's advocate, I think it is because the minus has not been defined as a string operation (e.g. it could pop the last char), so it defaults to the mathematical operation and converts both inputs into ints.

The first is assumed to be a concat because one of the parcels is a string...

It's just doing a lot of stuff for you that it shouldn't be in first place 🤭

[-] [email protected] 41 points 1 week ago

Yup. It's completely inconsistent in its interpretation of the + operator.

[-] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yeah, I actually had to try 1+"11" to check that it didn't give me 12, but thankfully ~~it commutes~~ it's consistent 😇

[-] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago

it commutes

Maybe the behaviour with regard to type conversion, but not for the operation itself.

"13"+12 and 12+"13" don't yield the same result.

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[-] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago

It's just doing a lot of stuff for you that it shouldn't be in first place 🤭

Kinda like log4j!

[-] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago

Yeah, this looks dumb on the surface, but you've got bigger problems if you're trying to do math with strings

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[-] [email protected] 37 points 1 week ago

From all the Javascript quiks this is the least stupid and the most obvious.

[-] [email protected] 29 points 1 week ago
[-] [email protected] 34 points 1 week ago
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[-] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago

Unfortunately, it makes sense if you know what + means, which is concatenate. - is strictly a math function though.

Not saying that makes this better. It just makes sense.

[-] [email protected] 26 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

It is 'comprehensible' in the sense that it's possible to figure out how it happened, but it absolutely does not "make sense" in terms of being a reasonable language design decision. It's 100% incompetence on the part of the person who created Javascript.

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[-] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

I think I'm on the side of "if you do this in your code, you deserve what you get."

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[-] [email protected] 62 points 1 week ago

[object Object][object Object]

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[-] [email protected] 43 points 1 week ago

People that try to do mathematical operations with strings blaming the programming language that had a stated design goal to do its best and try to keep running scripts that make no sense because they realized it would be used by people that have no idea what they are doing. Clearly they were right.

[-] [email protected] 38 points 1 week ago

the programming language that had a stated design goal to do its best and try to keep running scripts that make no sense...

...itself makes no sense. It is wrong and bad that Javascript was ever designed that way in the first place.

[-] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago

It was never intended to run full applications but only the small business scripts and hobbyist homepage stuff that were the thing in the 90s, across inconsistent browsers that were a jungle of hit and miss behaviour where it was preferred that menus keep working even if the mouse effect was not. Anything of scale was expected to be done in Java. Dynamic web pages did not exist and as anything not static was generated server side into a static html file to be rendered on the client.

Anyway, back then it wasn't considered the job of the programming language to hold the hand of the aspiring developer as it is common today. It's not a bad thing that IDE and even compilers and preprocessors try to help you write better code today, but then it simply didn't exist.

JavaScript is from a different time and because it has the hard requirement or backwards compatibility there is no changing it and has not been for thirty years except to add stuff to it.

I think it's just silly to ask the past to keep up with the present. Bad code is not the fault of the language regardless, even though junior devs and even seasoned ones like to think so to protect their ego. I think it is better to accept it, learn from it and roll with it because every single platform and language has their weird quirks anyway.

Signed, old dude that learned programming in 8 bit BASIC and 6502 machine code without an assembler, where code bad enough would freeze your machine that required a cold boot and starting over from your last save that you didn't do.

[-] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago

Anyway, back then it wasn't considered the job of the programming language to hold the hand of the aspiring developer as it is common today.

But that’s exactly what it’s doing by trying to figure out what the developer meant. ‘“11” + 1’, should cause the compiler to tell the developer to to fuck themselves.

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[-] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

it would be used by people that have no idea what they are doing. Clearly

And so let's enable these people?
Let's add AI to the mix while we're at it.

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[-] [email protected] 29 points 1 week ago

To start off... Using arithmetic operators on strings in combination with integers is a pure skill issue. Let's disregard this.

If you were to use + where one part is a string, it's natural to assume a string appending is desired since + is commonly used as a function for this. On the other hand, - is never used for any string operation. Therefore, it's safe to assume that it relates to actual artihmetics and any strings should therefore be converted to numerical values.

This is an issue with untyped languages. If you don't like it, use typescript. End of story.

[-] [email protected] 32 points 1 week ago

Instead of trying to make it work, javascript could just say "error." Being untyped doesn't mean you can't have error messages.

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[-] [email protected] 25 points 1 week ago

Imagine doing math with strings and then blaming the language not yourself

[-] [email protected] 43 points 1 week ago

The risk is when it happens unintentionally. The language is bad for hiding such errors by being overly 'helpful' in assuming intent.

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[-] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago

The problem is consistency.

[-] [email protected] 24 points 1 week ago

Lets fix it. I think that since we are removing the ones, then "11" - 1 should be equal to "".

[-] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago

Should it, or should it be "1"? (just removing one, one)

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[-] [email protected] 23 points 1 week ago

If you mix types like that, it's your own fault

[-] [email protected] 34 points 1 week ago

BS. A language shouldn't have operators that allow non sensical operations like string concatenation when one operand is not a string.

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[-] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago
[-] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

This is a really good interview, and does a good job highlighting Javascript's biggest strength: it's flexibility.

“It was also an incredible rush job, so there were mistakes in it. Something that I think is important about it is that I knew there would be mistakes, and there would be gaps, so I made it very malleable as a language.”

He cites the “discovery” of asm.js inside of JavaScript, calling it “another thing I’m particularly proud of in the last 10 years.” It uses the bitwise operators that were included in the original JavaScript which are now the basis for a statically-typed language with machine types for high-speed performance. “If it hadn’t been in there from 1995, it would’ve been hard to add later. And the fact that it was there all along meant we could do incredibly fast JavaScript.”

He tells InfoWorld it’s “this very potent seed that was in the original JavaScript from the 10 days of May in 1995.” JavaScript’s 32-bit math operators (known as bitwise operators) trace their lineage all the way back to the C programming language — and to Java. This eventually led to WebAssembly — a way to convert instructions into a quickly-executable binary format for virtual machines — and the realization that with a JavaScript engine, “you can have two languages — the old language I did with the curly braces and the functions and the shift operators, and this new language which is a binary language, not meant for reading by humans or writing. But it can be generated by compilers and tools, and can be read by tools…”

[-] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago
[-] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

so plus coerces into string if not number, was that so hard?

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[-] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago
[-] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Javascript is a dogshit language that everyone is stuck with. The best that we can hope for is the likes of typescript take the edge off of it. Even though it's like smearing marzipan over a turd. At least it's ok if you don't take a deep bite.

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[-] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago

Feels like it could be one of those facebook posts to test "smart" people. Only the top 1% of people can answer this simple math question: "11" + 2 * 2 - 3

[-] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago

Heck, I need to learn some new languages apparently. Here I was expecting an angry "CS0029 cannot implicitly convert type 'string' to 'int'!

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this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
1019 points (98.6% liked)

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