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The JavaScript type coercion algorithm
(lemmy.ml)
That's it. That's the meme.
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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
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That's a very narrow definition of limited usefulness, and in practice it means your code is overly verbose and inflexible. You get stuck with polymorphism everywhere or you're explicitly converting data all the time for nothing.
Plus, if you try to process some data from an external source (which you have to if you want to do anything useful) you don't have any way to test if it's the right type before execution, so you're back at the same place that Python is, without the ability to cleanly recover.
I believe now it is my turn to say you're spewing nonsense. Have you ever used a language with a type system? Because this whole idea of "testing external data to see if it is the right type" doesn't really make sense.
At the lowest layer, generally, external data is an array of bytes. It has no other type you could "test". However, you can decode or parse it into a form that makes sense for your program. And why couldn't I cleanly recover from parse errors? (And how do you think Python does it?)
Clearly you've never programmed anything outside of theoretical computer science or heavily enclosed and controlled systems.