Stuart LangridgeDec 8
I wish people would stop saying "JavaScript was written in 10 days" with the subtle implication that this is somehow shoddy or half-arsed. GvR wrote the first version of Python in a month in December 1989; the first bit of C was made out of B and NB in a month or two in ~1970. Every single bit of software you've ever used that isn't some enterprise nightmare was first a proof of concept hacked together in a couple of weeks by whoever first did it. This is entirely normal; it's not a bad thing!
Show threadDaniel LyonsDec 8

@sil the biggest thing that everyone hates about JavaScript is implicit type conversions. It’s a feature that is so bad that an entirely new language was eventually built to fix it.

Oh and implicit type conversion was added after launch when users demanded it (i.e. not during those 10 days)

Show threadSven Slootweg, low-spoons mode ("still kinky and horny anyway")

@dandylyons @sil I assume you're referring to Typescript, in which case it definitely does not "fix" implicit type conversations. TS is a language that only exists as a pre-compilation language, it doesn't have any runtime characteristics of its own, and therefore just takes on those of its target language (ie. JS). Implicit type conversion is a runtime characteristic, not a syntactic one.

What TS did was (mostly) replacing dynamic with static typing, but that's something very different from removing implicit type conversion. TS code will still happily result in implicit type conversion if the values being handled would trigger it, and it's very easy for this to happen accidentally when eg. handling structured external input, because you can't statically check that at compile time.

If you rely on TS to prevent implicit type conversion, you're going to have a bad time and a lot of weird bugs, is what I'm saying.

(I do agree that the implicit type conversion is a terrible misfeature, for what it's worth.)

Dec 8 at 3:52pmWeb
Show threadDaniel LyonsDec 8
@joepie91 @sil Yes. You're right. The point that I was making is that Microsoft and the JS community devoted a massive amount of resources to create TS in order to bandaid the massive problem of implicit type conversion.
Show threadSven Slootweg, low-spoons mode ("still kinky and horny anyway")Dec 8
@dandylyons @sil Yeah, in that phrasing I would wholly agree 🙂