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Cake day: March 23rd, 2025

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  • I once had a company give me an assignment that sounded very much like what you are describing. They said I should allocate 10h at once to implement a real-life task that they had and that their developers “already solved”.

    At that point I only wrote a handful messages with their recruiter and hadn’t even spoken to a human there. I didn’t even know anything about the team, my potential boss or the project at that time.

    I didn’t even answer back, just ghosted them. I’m not going to spend multiple hundreds of Euros of my time just for some assignent to maybe qualify for an interview.




  • You always have to balance: Do you want the user to have “some” user experience, or none at all.

    In the case of image viewers or browsers or stuff, it’s most often better to show the user something, even if it isn’t perfect, than to show nothing at all. Especially if it’s an user who can’t do anything to fix the broken thing at all.

    That said, if the user is a developer who is currently developing the solution, then the parser should be as strict as possible, because the developer can fix stuff before it goes into production.





  • The Nigerian understanding of religion is fascinating. They just take what they need from any place they want. In the western world most people stick with the faith they were born in, or maybe switch once or twice in their lifetime. In Nigeria it’s common to switch very frequently, always taking the parts they like best and leaving behind the rest.

    It’s a very open and interesting way to look at things, not so much tied to their own personal identity (“I am protestant, so I must hate catholics” as it used to be common in the west), but instead they build their own faith from all the best sources they can find.



  • This.

    Just from the features and the convenience, Reddit is better. It’s bigger, it’s got more content, it’s easier, it’s more stable (or at least used to be). You don’t have to worry about your instance going under or anything like that.

    The reason for the devs to invest their time to make lemmy and the apps and for admins to invest money and time into hosting and running the instances and for users to use this instead of Reddit is mainly the politics of wanting to have your own space with your own data.



  • You basically defied the whole NaN thing. I may even agree that it should always throw an error instead, but… Found a good explanation by someone:

    NaN is the number which results from math operations which make no sense

    Well, technically this is the explanation, it really isn’t a good one.

    x + 1 with x not being defined also doesn’t result in a NaN but instead it throws a reference error, even though that undefined variable isn’t a number either. And x = 1;x.toUpperCase(); also doesn’t silently do anything, even though in this case it could totally return "1" by coercing x to a string first. Instead it throws a TypeError.

    It’s really only around number handling where JS gets so weird.

    Yeah but actually there can be many interpretations of what someone would mean by that. Increase the bytecode of the last symbol, or search for “1” and wipe it from string. The important thing is that it’s not obvious what a person who wrote that wants really, without additional input.

    That’s exactly the thing. It’s not obvious what the person wants and a NaN is most likely not what the person wants at either. So what’s the point in defaulting to something they certainly didn’t want instead of making it obvious that the input made no sense?

    A similarly ambiguous situation would be something like x = 2 y. For someone with a mathematical background this clearly looks like x = 2 * y with an implicit multiplication sign. But it’s not in the JS standard to interpret implicit multiplication signs. If you want multiplication, it needs to explicitly use the sign. And thus JS dutifully throws a Syntax Error instead of just guessing what the programmer maybe wanted.

    Anyway, your original suggestion was about discrepancy between + and - functionality. I only pointed out that it’s natural when dealing with various data types.

    My main point here was that if you have mathematical symbols for string operations, all of the acceptable operations using mathematical symbols need to be string operations. Like e.g. "ab" * 2 => "abab", which many languages provide. That’s consistent. I didn’t mean that all of these operators need to be implemented, but if they aren’t they should throw an error (I stated that in my original comment).

    What’s an issue here is that “1” + 1 does a string concatenation, while “1” - 1 converts to int and does a math operation. That’s inconsistent. Because even you want to use that feature, you will stumble over + not performing a math operation like -.

    So it should either be that +/- always to math operations and you have a separate operator (e.g. . or ..) for concatenation, or if you overload + with string operations, all of the operators that don’t throw an exception need to be strictly string-operations-only.


  • There is operator overloading happening - the + operator has a different meaning depending on the types involved. Your issue however seems to be with the type coercion, not the operator overloading.

    For string + string and number + number there is operator overloading, that’s correct. For string + number there is not, there’s only type coercion. It becomes string + string(number). All of that is fine. Other languages do that as well.

    What’s not fine is that JS also looks the other way on the type coercion tree: There’s no string - string overloading, so it goes down the type coercion tree, looking for any - operation that it can cast to and it ends up with number(string) - number(string), which makes no sense at all.

    If you don’t want it to happen either use a different language, or ensure you don’t run into this case (e.g. by using Typescript). It’s an unfortunate fact that this does happen, and it will never be removed due to backwards compatibility.

    It’s not the point of the discussion that there are other languages that are better. This here is about complaining about bad language design, and no matter how you turn this, this is not a matter of taste or anything, this is just bad language design.

    You are obviously right that this crap will stay in JS forever. That doesn’t make it good design.



  • Because there’s in fact no operator overloading happening, true, but that’s mostly an under-the-hood topic.

    It should not happen no matter why it does happen under the hood.

    Operator overloading for string - string is wrong and type coercion to implicitly cast this to int(string) - int(string) is just as wrong.



  • Yeah, and almost all languages I know then would throw an exception when you try to use - with a string, and if they offer multiple operators that take a string and a number, they always only perform string operations with that and never cast to a number type to do math operations with it.

    (e.g. some languages have + for string concatenation and * to add the same string X time together, so e.g. "ab" * 2 => "abab". It’s a terrible idea to have + perform a string operation and - performs a math operation.)