That’s it. That’s the meme.

  • jedibob5@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Javascript’s type coercion is rather insane, yes, but there is an actual, practical reason it’s done. JS, having been designed to be run in web browsers, wants to avoid blowing up and crashing at all costs. If it gets an unusual type comparison, usually the result of a bug, it tries to return something, such that the script can continue running if at all possible. In JS’ mentality, keeping a page running, even if it might not completely function properly, is preferable to throwing an unhandled exception and completely crashing it.

    Whether or not that is the right approach is debatable, but there is at least some logic to it. Personally, I think that the proliferation of Node letting JS run outside of browsers exacerbates a lot of JS’ issues, but TypeScript does a lot to make it look like a more sensible language.

      • retrolasered@feddit.uk
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        5 months ago

        I genuinely wasn’t aware of that. I must be getting javascript confused for almost any other language. I wonder how many times ive !!'d a value to make that work without actually absorbing that into my head now…

        • Telemachus93@slrpnk.net
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          5 months ago

          In other languages that shouldn’t be equal either though, right?

          Maybe you meant

          if (2){
          console.log("nonzero ints are truthy")
          }
          else {
          console.log("no they're not")
          }
          

          Which would output

          nonzero ints are truthy
          

          and that would actually work in all languages I know. But that’s different from being equal.

    • Telemachus93@slrpnk.net
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      5 months ago

      Mh, ‘0’ is a nonempty string, so !‘0’ returns false. Then of course !(!‘0’) would return true. I’d absolutely expect this, Python does the same.

      And the second thing is just JavaScript’s type coercion shenanigans. In Python

      bool('0') # returns True because of nonempty string
      bool(int('0')) # returns False because 0 == False
      

      Knowing that JavaScript does a lot of implicit type conversions, stuff like that doesn’t strike me as very surprising.