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by simias 2245 days ago
JS is not "untyped". It literally has a "typeof" operator. You probably mean strongly vs. weakly typed. JS is dynamically, rather weakly typed. Python is dynamically, strong-ish-ly typed. C is statically, weakly typed. Rust is statically, strongly type.

Those two attributes are mostly orthogonal.
1 comments
mantap 2244 days ago
There's no such thing as "strongly" or "weakly" typed languages. Those terms have no definition and are meaningless. Yes Wikipedia will tell you that C and JS are weakly typed, but what attribute is it that C and JS's type systems share? They share absolutely nothing in common.

Dynamic typing refers to checking of types at runtime. JS does not do this consistently or effectively. Python does.

The typeof operator cannot be the basis of a type system since you can count all the answers it gives on your fingers. JS needs a bunch of extra functions like Array.isArray() to determine if something is an array or not. The language itself has no clue, everything that isn't a primitive is just an "object" as far as JS is concerned.

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simias 2244 days ago
"Strongly" and "weakly" typed is not a binary attribute of a language and there's a gradient so languages can be more or less strongly or weakly typed but I think those are still useful qualifiers. C lets you add ints and doubles without explicit cast, Rust doesn't. Rust is more strongly typed than C. It's not meaningless to say that. A metric being partially relative or interpretative doesn't make it useless.

For the rest I don't understand how anybody can seriously make the argument that JS has no types. Shell scripts have no types because almost everything is a character string and that's it. JS type system is very limited but it does exist and I don't see how it can be used to justify {} + [] = 0, which is where we started (especially given that {} and [] are objects in JS, but 0 is a "number", so different core types). Adding two objects and getting a number is not a limitation of the type system, it's a conscious decision by the designers (or at least the side effect of one).

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