Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good talk!
Wasn't that where the "wat" got started?
Yes, it was the proto-wat.
JavaScript Is Weird
321–330 of 383 posts
Re: JavaScript Is Weird
#3220.2 + 0.1 === 0.3 That's not really a JS problem, that's a floating point problem. Plenty of languages will have the same issue. +!![] "" - - "" (null - 0) + "0" Calling these things weird is fair enough but I can't help thinking this is code you'd never actually write outside of the context of a "Look how weird JS is!" post. It's like picking examples from the Annual Obfuscated C Contest to show how hard it is to un…
The site does say so in the introduction > Even if you're a JS developer, most of this syntax is probably, and hopefully, not something you use in your daily life. So I think you should look at this site more as something fun you might not have known if you're an js developer than as criticism of js. That being said, the !!"" isn't that weird of a syntax is it? I see and use the double exclamation mark all the time.
I doubt that anyone who hasn't written JS will recognize !! as an idiom for converting to boolean.
Re: JavaScript Is Weird
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
We've had these exact same sorts of issues in PHP. It can go undetected for awhile and cause subtle bugs. A good type system helps a lot. I appreciate that Kotlin is more stringent than Java with no implicit conversions between Int/Long/Float/Double.
I once lost most of an afternoon debugging an issue where orders in a PHP e-commerce system would very occasionally fail. Turns out several months before, someone was doing some refactoring, moved some methods around, but also changed a "==" to a "===" in the process. Generally a good idea, but it slipped through to production without anyone noticing or breaking any tests. The issue ended up being that a rare code pa…
The problem here is == was used in the beginning. Always use ===.
Re: JavaScript Is Weird
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
JS has a very weak type system, full of implicit conversions. In dynamic languages with strong type systems, like Common Lisp, such operations typically result in errors: (+ (not (not '()))) The value NIL is not of the expected type NUMBER. Similarly in Ruby: +!![] undefined method `+@' for true:TrueClass (NoMethodError) [Condition of type TYPE-ERROR] Interestingly, Python does the same thing as JS in this case, even…
> Interestingly, Python does the same thing as JS in this case, even though it is typically quite strongly typed. [...] > Python outputs 0, it doesn't complain like the other two. yep, this is one of those Python weird bits. in Python, booleans are ints, True is 1 and 0 is False. and i don't mean it in a JS-ish way like "they can be converted to...". no, True is the integer value 1. in fact, the type bool is a subtyp…
Python was created February 1991, but it didn't have a boolean type until 2002 per PEP 285 https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0285/>
The rationale for making bool a subset of integers is for ease of implementation and substitutability (which aids backwards compatibility)47, as explained here:
> In an ideal world, bool might be better implemented as a separate integer type that knows how to perform mixed-mode arithmetic. However, inheriting bool from int eases the implementation enormously (in part since all C code that calls PyInt_Check() will continue to work -- this returns true for subclasses of int). Also, I believe this is right in terms of substitutability: code that requires an int can be fed a bool and it will behave the same as 0 or 1.
I have some Python code where there are still a number of uses of 0 and 1 for false and true, because it was written before Python added a boolean type.
Re: JavaScript Is Weird
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
The site does say so in the introduction > Even if you're a JS developer, most of this syntax is probably, and hopefully, not something you use in your daily life. So I think you should look at this site more as something fun you might not have known if you're an js developer than as criticism of js. That being said, the !!"" isn't that weird of a syntax is it? I see and use the double exclamation mark all the time.
I doubt that anyone who hasn't written JS will recognize !! as an idiom for converting to boolean.
That kind of type coercion predates JS.
perl -e 'print !!"whee"'
1
php -r 'print !!"whee";'
1
awk 'BEGIN {print !!"whee"}'
1Re: JavaScript Is Weird
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hardware doesn't exist in any meaningful way for 90% or professional programmers anymore. Way too much abstraction for that to be an argument.
I don't agree. Even if you aren't programming microcontrollers, even if you're just building brochure websites for mobiles, you'll do it better if you understand hardware.
> you'll do it better if you understand hardware.
Oh for sure. I agree. That's not what we're arguing though.
Re: JavaScript Is Weird
#327I have limited knowledge in web development and its history, but why is javascript a first class language in web dev when all I heard is "javascript bad"? Web assembly seems like a much better choice in hindsight where you can choose different language to compile down to wasm.
If you have limited exposure to JavaScript, that’s great. Try to keep it that way. Personally, the article/quiz reminds me what an utter shit field web development really is and that shaving my face with a lawn mower and hot sauce might be the preferable alternative. Also, reading the sibling comments here describing JavaScript as having characteristics like “great defaults” and “reasonable rules in place” make me wonder what fucked up alternate reality they’re all living in where those are true.
Re: JavaScript Is Weird
#328Judging by the title, it sounded like the biggest discovery of 2021... by someone waking after a long coma. It was discovered in 2012: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat I really enjoyed the questions... and even though I am working in TypeScript, I got only 9/25. Precisely because I avoid f---ed up parts of JS, except for trivia games ( https://dorey.github.io/JavaScript-Equality-Table/unified/ , http://ww…
https://xkcd.com/1053/ There are a lot of people being born every year. If a 16-18 year old teenager is getting into web development, they were 4-6 when that talk was given in 2012. Sure, that talk still appears here and there, but it's past its prime and you'd have to be in the right place at the right time to run into it. Crockford's book (JS: The Good Parts) was ubiquitous among JS devs who were coding between 200…
It's amazing how much of a positive effect that short comic has had on my life.
Re: JavaScript Is Weird
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Can it be that JS is not good starting language then? @ozim, I don't believe you are trolling! JS is an absolutely awful language for beginners; it's a 155mm howitzer pointed at your foot. Although you can get the hang of the basics quickly, AND it runs in the browser (super-convenient unless you're headless), those "basics" that you thought you'd got the hang of turn out to have semantics that make sense, but are…
Having designed programming curriculum, I have to disagree that the language is a bad language for beginners (though it is very far from ideal). To be fair the primary reason is not really a virtue of Javascript per se, but the fact that it runs in the browser is a large pedagogical gain that no other language can easily match and is hard to overstate. Learning to program is overwhelming for most students, and settin…
I wonder if Typescript would make a great first language, since a subset of it runs in the browser, but the IDE and compiler can prevent some very bad bugs.
Re: JavaScript Is Weird
#330Probably unpopular opinion: Most of these are just the weirdness of the language caused by the (not-so-wise) design decision that those simple operators should never throw. In my opinion, these are not footguns and should not be used to attack JavaScript, because regular programmers are very unlikely to run into them (which is why when presented, they seem so obscure). However, that is not to say JavaScript is withou…
JavaScript sorting numbers alphabetically is a fact I simply cannot get over. I know I should be pragmatic as an engineer but this goes against the core of my being. Awful.
It also alters the original array, just awful usability.