Hello!
In this article, we will talk about a sensitive subject in many developers’ communities: “Why use or not use JavaScript ?”.
Environments & versions
In that article, we will consider that the developer is using strict mode, the latest JavaScript versions - ES8/9/10/11/next depending on the support - few details are available on Wikipedia or the official specification.
We will also consider that the developer will follow good practices as a Style Guide - like airbnb, google, etc - or any other standard.
Now, that the context is defined, we can start to talk about the subject.
Type system
Comparisons
We can find two kinds of issues because of the type system, the first one is the comparison system. In JavaScript, you can write:
1
2
3
[] == 0; // true
"0" == 0; // true
[] == "0"; // false
There are many cases of comparisons where some are pretty “logical”, but transitivity isn’t satisfied. Fortunately, it’s easy to avoid that problem:
1
2
3
[] === 0; // false
"0" === 0; // false
[] === "0"; // false
The difference between == and === is that the first one checks equality between values (it can cast type to compare), and the second one checks the type and the value.
typeof and instanceof
Those two keywords can have unexpected behavior, for example with string type:
1
2
typeof "chaine de caractere"; // "string"
"chaine de caractere" instanceof String; // false
This is not really a bug, but a wrongly defined behavior, because you can write:
1
(new String("chaine de caractere")) instanceof String; // true
We can note that the “primitive variable” string isn’t considered as its object equivalent.
Another example of typeof issue often used to mock the language is:
1
typeof NaN; // "number"
Yes, you read right, NaN - Not a Number - is considered as a number when using the typeof operator. And that same category, null is considered of type object. But as for String, null is not instanceof Object, same for NaN and Number.
False issues
While doing my research to write that article, I noticed some issues were listed that are not - by mistake or bad faith - real issues, I’ll talk about some of them.
Order of numbers
1
Math.min() < Math.max() // false
When I saw that example for the first time, I doubted the language and its conception. Then, I did some research about those two functions. Math.min() and Math.max() do not give minimum and maximum numbers - as we can think - but minimum and maximum of their arguments. The algorithm for Math.max() has as a default value Infinity and compares with each parameter.
1
2
Math.min() // Infinity
Math.max() // -Infinity
The real issue of those functions, is, that they shouldn’t accept when the developer isn’t giving any argument.
Immutability and variable hoisting
A very often reported problem in the past was about the variable hoisting and its immutability. This was fixed in ES6 when the standard added the keywords let and const. We can also talk about Object.freeze() that is going to apply even more immutability restrictions than const.
Offside issues
Few issues can be considered as “offside” because not about the language itself. One of these problems is the floating numbers representation.
1
0.1+0.2==0.3; // false, because equal to 0.30000000000000004 when using standard float representation
Main solution to those issues
After reading those lists of negative and positive points, we can see that there are plenty of easy-to-make (and to-solve) problems. Fortunately, there are plenty of code checkers that we call “Linter” that can help you with that. There’s for example: eslint, jshint, or jslint that you can add (or have already added) to your text editor or your IDE.
I could also talk (and I will probably do in a future article) about code quality tools - working with any language like Sonarqube or Codacy.
JSFuck
The last subject of that article is about JSFuck (http://www.jsfuck.com). It’s a fun syntax when you code JavaScript with only 6 different characters and you’re able to write any JavaScript code.
It’s about being able to push the language to its limits using some (good or bad) behavior of the engine to be able to run the script.
If you wanna read more about how it works, you can go on their official website: http://www.jsfuck.com
Conclusion
Don’t hesitate to share that page if you have a debate about the advantages and drawbacks of JavaScript. I hope that you liked that small article, cya!
Sources:
- https://wiki.theory.org/index.php/YourLanguageSucks#JavaScript_sucks_because
- https://charlieharvey.org.uk/page/javascript_the_weird_parts
- https://developer.mozilla.org/fr/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Opérateurs/instanceof
Article references: