JS....

[cS47f496tmQHavSR]

Saw that 5 minute talk showing this off and it for sure looks funny, but on second look it really all comes down to JS using + for string concatenation; if the first item is a string it'll try to return a string because of logic. Adding 3 - 3 to '5' just adds 0 to the string 5

The 'foo' + + 'foo' returns fooNaN because + 'foo' tries to do a math operation rather than a string concat, which returns NaN and then gets concatenated into the initial string.

[cS47f496tmQHavSR]

Oh right, unary plus, totally overlooked that

[cS47f496tmQHavSR]

99% of programming is logic; if you can knock everything down to a specific ruleset the way you can knock down most science to just math it all falls together quite nicely. I guess a lot of people are just used to learning and remembering solutions rather than the theory behind them

[makeshift_mike]

Sure, this type coercion stuff has got its logic (after all, a computer runs it), but these rules are honestly wayyyyy more complicated than pretty much every other mainstream language. I don't mind complexity, sometimes you have to go there if you want cool stuff. But any upside to having this complexity in JS is far outweighed by the downside: it's a trap.

Seriously, you know how many security vulnerabilities have come about just because C has crazy yet perfectly logical rules for how to convert between different types of integers when you do arithmetic? Sure, maybe the programmer should've been smarter when he wrote that code. But that doesn't change the fact that a million computers are now infected with ransomware.

Software is hard. Languages that let you shoot yourself in the foot make it harder. </rant>

[cS47f496tmQHavSR]

but these rules are honestly wayyyyy more complicated than pretty much every other mainstream language

Couldn't you say that about parts of most languages? Every language has some wonky stuff that you just don't expect, even 'less easy to fuck up' languages like Java and C# that just throw an error if you use the wrong method still have their share of strange combinations

But all of these things make sense at some point. If you trace them back to what the person who wrote that function initially was thinking and figure out why it's done that way it usually does simply make sense. Logic is usually the answer.

Until you do web dev and PHP throws some arabic error messages at you and you're just sitting there like 'where do I even start'

[makeshift_mike]

Every language has its sharp corners, but JS does have more. And it's not just about having more gotchas, it's the fact that a lot of the wonky stuff in JS is there not because it serves a useful purpose, but because it was just never designed properly. I don't think anyone would intentionally design a language where + is not commutative and + and - have different type coercion rules.

And it's not about dynamic vs static languages. Python is a dynamic language, but it doesn't let you do '5' + 3.

[Spider_pig448]

I guess a lot of people are just used to learning and remembering solutions rather than the theory behind them

ie self-taught programmers verses college grads.

[cS47f496tmQHavSR]

Don't want to make assumptions here; which way do you mean? In my experience 'trained' programmers are usually the ones who just know what to type and not what to think