On the other hand, I don't think you should add those ever
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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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.
Agreed! Unfortunately these maddening behaviors were kind of set in stone several decades ago, and it has been (correctly) decided "Don't break the web", these weird quirks are kept in modern interpreters/compilers.
It's actually quite interesting to read through the logic to follow when implementing an interpreter:
https://262.ecma-international.org/13.0/#sec-object.prototype.tostring
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Onfuscators probably use it though, so no spec ever will be able to get rid of this crap.
Can I vote for obsfuscators not holding a language hostage?
Best I can do is tie your pension to it.
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Use TypeScript, and nonsensical things like adding arrays to objects will be compile-time errors.
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.
Most libraries have TypeScript types these days, either bundled directly with the library (common with newer libraries), or as part of the DefinitelyTyped project.
DefinitelyTyped is the exact kind of thing I'm talking about. You put TypeScript definitions over things, but under the hood it's still JavaScript and can fail in JavaScript ways.
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So a strictly typed language.. I think those already exist.
If there was an easy way to use rust or something on webassemly and use that instead of JS. I'd be so happy, but I can't find how to do it without npm.
It's in alpha, but there is a Kotlin to wasm compiler in the works.
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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.
Pascal went to military school.
I'm not in love with the idea, but a language that cuts out the BS has a sudden appeal when on a group/team project.
That analogy was chosen for a reason. Ada was originally developed by DOD committee and a French programming team to be a programming language for Defense projects between 1977 and 1983 that they were still using at least into the early 2000s. It's based on Pascal.
It was intended for applications where reliability was the highest priority (above things like performance or ease of use) and one of the consequences of that is that there are no warnings - only compiler errors, and a lot of common bad practices that will be allowed to fly or maybe at worst generate a warning in other languages will themselves generate compiler errors. Do it right or don't bother trying. No implicit typecasting, even something like 1 + 0.5 where it's obvious what is intended is a compiler error because you are trying to add an integer to a real without explicitly converting either - you're in extremely strongly-typed country here.
Libraries are split across two files, one is essentially the interfaces for the library and the other is it's implementation (not that weird, and not that different than C/C++ header files though the code looks closer to Pascal interface and implementation sections put in separate files). The intent at the time being that different teams or different subcontractors might be building each module and by establishing a fixed interface up front and spelling out in great detail in documentation what each piece of that interface is supposed to do the actual implementation could be done separately and hypothetically have a predictable result.
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:
You can tell that they find the answers absurd and the WAT memes are universally funny.
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Just wait until OP learns about cross product of matrices.
mfw non-commutativeness
In node, I get the same result in both cases. "[object Object]"
It's calling the toString() method on both of them, which in the array case is the same as calling .join(",") on the array. For an empty array, that results in an empty string added to "[object Object]" at either end in the respective case in the picture.
Not sure how we'd get 0 though. Anybody know an implementation that does that? Browsers do that maybe? Which way is spec compliant? Number([]) is 0, and I think maybe it's in the spec that the algorithm for type coercion includes an initial attempt to convert to Number before falling back to toString()? I dunno, this is all off the top of my head.
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: 
So there's yet another level of quirkery to this bullshit then, it seems. 😆 Nice digging! 🤝
I also noticed that if you surround the curlies with parentheses, you get the same again:
> eval('{} + []')
0
> eval('({}) + []')
'[object Object]'
Yep, parentheses force {} to be interpreted as an expression rather than a block — same reason why IIFEs have !function instead of just function.
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This is why I try my damnedest not to write in weakly typed languages.
string + object makes no logical sense, but the language will be like "'no biggie, you probably meant string + string so let's convert the object to string"! And so all hell breaks loose when the language's assumption is wrong.
You don't necessarily need types for that kind of thing though, a strict linter that flags that code works just as well
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It's best not to touch anything web related, lest you want to go mad. It's like the elder scrolls or laying eyes on some cosmic horror creature. Tbf this also goes for C++
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Who would use that kind of type coercion? Who? I want to see his face.
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.
Just use a formatter. It'll show you that the second one is two statements:
{}(the empty block)+[]coerce an empty array to a number:new Number(new Array())
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It's not even the coercion that is the problem here. The types are already bad by themselves.
GIGO
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.
I really don't think that there is any perfect programming language.
You'd be wrong 🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀
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JavaScript, like some other languages of the time, was designed with the Robustness Principle in mind. Arguably the wrong end of the Robustness Principle, but still.
That is, it was designed to accept anything that wasn't a syntax error (if not a few other things besides) and not generate run-time errors unless absolutely necessary. The thinking was that the last thing the user of something written in JavaScript wants is for their browser to crash or lock up because something divided by zero or couldn't find an object property.
Also it was originally written in about five minutes by one guy who hadn't had enough sleep. (I may have misremembered this part, but I get the feeling I'm not too far off.)
It was 10 days, but, yeah, not a lot of time, especially for one guy. (That one guy was Brendan Eich, by the way.)
I love inside jokes. I hope you be apart of one someday
How about SQL in PostgreSql?
query: select array_length(Array[]::text[], 1)
Output: null
Dont get me wrong JS is still awful
I'm in this no-experience-to-apprenticeship program and everyone in my class thinks type coercion is the greatest thing ever.
Just be better lmao
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