[kbenson]

> The world has generally considered weak typing a very bad idea.

Now that is the type of thing that screams for supporting evidence.

> Type coercion has too many edge cases and unintuitive/unexpected combinations.

That depends on the implementation. I would say Perl handles this problem neatly by making the coercion done entirely based on the operator used, so it's always obvious.

[sdegutis]

> Now that is the type of thing that screams for supporting evidence.

I think the direction of mainstream programming languages over the past 20 years is overwhelmingly clear about this.

There's only one language that I know of that's still in popular use and that likes weak typing.

> That depends on the implementation. I would say Perl handles

Yep that's the one.

[kbenson]

> There's only one language that I know of that's still in popular use and that likes weak typing.

As much as I wish it wasn't so, I believe PHP sees more activity currently than Perl, and it's also weakly typed.

Javascript itself is weakly typed as well, which is why we're all having this discussion.

I would say that two of the most popular languages (probably the two most popular new languages) of the last two decades have been weakly typed.

[sdegutis]

That's a fair point, but I think this article shows that weak typing in JS is actively avoided by most people. That's why the article is interesting in the first place. I don't know if PHP heavily relies on weak typing though, I haven't used it in 9-10 years. But JS doesn't rely on it. It's just there, and easily avoided.