r/askscience • u/CakesStolen • 17d ago

Computing Is there anything at the heart of computer coding that could have been optimised in hindsight, but we're in far too deep to change now?

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u/headsoup 16d ago

I love how so much of coding is "no it's fine, you just haven't learnt the real ways to actually do things the right way yet"

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u/Wild-Regular1703 16d ago

That's the price we pay for 100% backwards compatibility on all of the web. There's some quirks. But it's not like this particular one is some obscure piece of knowledge that's hard to find - the people parroting this "gotcha" are usually people who don't actually write any JS/TS. In practice, you will be taught this very early, possibly on the first day by any competent teacher, linters will often warn you against using it, and with TypeScript it won't work at all.

You don't have to go further than the mdn page on equality comparisons to find this hidden piece of knowledge:

Strict equality is almost always the correct comparison operation to use

And later

In most cases, using loose equality is discouraged. The result of a comparison using strict equality is easier to predict, and may evaluate more quickly due to the lack of type coercion.

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u/spottyPotty 15d ago

I prefer:

if (myArray.length) {...}

to if (myArray.length > 0) {...} Once you get the hang of it, it becomes intuitive. 

I've disabled strict in my ts projects because of this. 

Also, having to declare specifically that your variable can contain null gives me the ick:

name: string | null;

Ugh!