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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

PHP? C?

Always remember to turn on warnings in PHP. I remember the joys of tracking down a mistyped variable name that PHP just instantiated and gave a null value to, which was then implicitly converted to empty string when the variable was used.

I agree that JS is not substantially "worse" than some other languages.

Despite these three languages giving far too much freedom to the programmers (which some might even like), high-quality code can be written in all three of them, as long as intelligent and strict coding guidelines are thoroughly followed.

I always think of languages as a solution space, and some points in the space possessing bugs while others don't. A perfect language(impossible) would make it so you could write any correct version of a program in the language but not any incorrect version. And language constraints like static typing have the disadvantage that you're preventing a bunch of correct possible solutions while closing off incorrect solutions. Ideally closing off many more incorrect solutions than correct ones increasing your chance of landing in a correction solution.

And of course lots of out of band(non-language) processes and tools that influence this like unit testing/code reviews/strict coding guidelines. But it's always nicer when it's prevented at the language level as opposed to out of band.

Last time I worked with those languages was in college 10 years ago so I didn't know portion of shooting myself in the foot was my fault versus the language.

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