This is too stupid so I had to check.
Fuck me.
this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
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Hm, playing devil's advocate, I think it is because the minus has not been defined as a string operation (e.g. it could pop the last char), so it defaults to the mathematical operation and converts both inputs into ints.
The first is assumed to be a concat because one of the parcels is a string...
It's just doing a lot of stuff for you that it shouldn't be in first place π€
Yup. It's completely inconsistent in its interpretation of the + operator.
Yeah, I actually had to try 1+"11" to check that it didn't give me 12, but thankfully ~~it commutes~~ it's consistent π
it commutes
Maybe the behaviour with regard to type conversion, but not for the operation itself.
"13"+12 and 12+"13" don't yield the same result.
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Yeah, this looks dumb on the surface, but you've got bigger problems if you're trying to do math with strings
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From all the Javascript quiks this is the least stupid and the most obvious.
Unfortunately, it makes sense if you know what + means, which is concatenate. - is strictly a math function though.
Not saying that makes this better. It just makes sense.
It is 'comprehensible' in the sense that it's possible to figure out how it happened, but it absolutely does not "make sense" in terms of being a reasonable language design decision. It's 100% incompetence on the part of the person who created Javascript.
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Imagine doing math with strings and then blaming the language not yourself
The risk is when it happens unintentionally. The language is bad for hiding such errors by being overly 'helpful' in assuming intent.
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The problem is consistency.
[object Object][object Object]
The fun strings to enter in web forms once in a while.
To start off... Using arithmetic operators on strings in combination with integers is a pure skill issue. Let's disregard this.
If you were to use + where one part is a string, it's natural to assume a string appending is desired since + is commonly used as a function for this. On the other hand, - is never used for any string operation. Therefore, it's safe to assume that it relates to actual artihmetics and any strings should therefore be converted to numerical values.
This is an issue with untyped languages. If you don't like it, use typescript. End of story.
Instead of trying to make it work, javascript could just say "error." Being untyped doesn't mean you can't have error messages.
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People that try to do mathematical operations with strings blaming the programming language that had a stated design goal to do its best and try to keep running scripts that make no sense because they realized it would be used by people that have no idea what they are doing. Clearly they were right.
the programming language that had a stated design goal to do its best and try to keep running scripts that make no sense...
...itself makes no sense. It is wrong and bad that Javascript was ever designed that way in the first place.
It was never intended to run full applications but only the small business scripts and hobbyist homepage stuff that were the thing in the 90s, across inconsistent browsers that were a jungle of hit and miss behaviour where it was preferred that menus keep working even if the mouse effect was not. Anything of scale was expected to be done in Java. Dynamic web pages did not exist and as anything not static was generated server side into a static html file to be rendered on the client.
Anyway, back then it wasn't considered the job of the programming language to hold the hand of the aspiring developer as it is common today. It's not a bad thing that IDE and even compilers and preprocessors try to help you write better code today, but then it simply didn't exist.
JavaScript is from a different time and because it has the hard requirement or backwards compatibility there is no changing it and has not been for thirty years except to add stuff to it.
I think it's just silly to ask the past to keep up with the present. Bad code is not the fault of the language regardless, even though junior devs and even seasoned ones like to think so to protect their ego. I think it is better to accept it, learn from it and roll with it because every single platform and language has their weird quirks anyway.
Signed, old dude that learned programming in 8 bit BASIC and 6502 machine code without an assembler, where code bad enough would freeze your machine that required a cold boot and starting over from your last save that you didn't do.
Anyway, back then it wasn't considered the job of the programming language to hold the hand of the aspiring developer as it is common today.
But thatβs exactly what itβs doing by trying to figure out what the developer meant. ββ11β + 1β, should cause the compiler to tell the developer to to fuck themselves.
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Javascript is a dogshit language that everyone is stuck with. The best that we can hope for is the likes of typescript take the edge off of it. Even though it's like smearing marzipan over a turd. At least it's ok if you don't take a deep bite.
JS should have never leaved the Browser side. Now you can use this thing for Backend and is just awful
If you mix types like that, it's your own fault
BS. A language shouldn't have operators that allow non sensical operations like string concatenation when one operand is not a string.
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Lets fix it. I think that since we are removing the ones, then "11" - 1 should be equal to "".
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Heck, I need to learn some new languages apparently. Here I was expecting an angry "CS0029 cannot implicitly convert type 'string' to 'int'!
This is my favorite language: GHC Haskell
GHC Haskell:
GHCi> length (2, "foo")
1
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Feels like it could be one of those facebook posts to test "smart" people. Only the top 1% of people can answer this simple math question: "11" + 2 * 2 - 3
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