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Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

> in most cases there is no need for the average developer to know it

This may come off as arrogant but.. I'll proceed nonetheless. There is a need for the average developer to know the interfaces of the functions they're choosing to use. They're well documented, and the documentation is neither hard to find, nor difficult to read.

There may be an argument here for strongly typed languages -vs- weakly typed ones, where often some of the ambiguity around optional function parameters is eased, but most languages have optional function parameters, this is not in any way unique to JS. And parseInt and [].map are very common JS methods: this is not some obscure API not all devs would be unfamiliar with, these are built-ins.

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Instead of thinking about code writing, think about code reading. Every organization has people who wrote buggy code, for a million reasons: they were distracted, they were hurried, they simply aren't that good (at either engineering or the language). Sometimes this stuff gets through review too, particularly in situations with deadlines.

But one of the safeguards here is that clean, intuitive code makes it possible for any engineer who's a little more thoughtful to catch little bugs like this. God knows I've done it dozens of times over the course of my career: while reading code for some other purpose, a block catches my eye as having something off about it, and I dig in and find a bug.

The problem with unintuitiveness,especially when it's baked into the language, is that you don't scrutinize every line of code you encounter with your full brain and attention. Without going on the hunt for "map and Javascript in general are horribly designed, parseInt has a rarely-used second param, root out likely bad uses", my brain on another task would skim right over a map-parseInt call like the above. It reads as if it's correct, and in any sane language it would be.

The part that is relatively unique to JS is where extra arguments passed to a function are silently ignored. In most every other language, the function passed to map takes 1 argument, which is also the common case in JS. But JS always passes 3 arguments to that function. I don't think it's optional parameters that people find confusing, it's the interplay between optional parameters and functions whose interface depends on functions they accept as arguments ignoring extra arguments.

I don't understand why this is downvoted to death without any replies. Sounds like a reasonable opinion but I'd also love to hear why people think it's downvote-worthy.

Not a downvoter, but I'll have a go:

You might be a dev who isn't very familiar with Javascript, but you still need to fix it. Or you might be having an off day. Or you're writing a critical fix under a lot of pressure and simply forget about the issue. And I'll bet if this code was being reviewed, most devs would still overlook the issue.

There are many real world scenarios where it isn't so easy or clear cut. We're all human, and we make mistakes. In other fields, we try and reduce how easy it is to make these mistakes. Some things will always be dangerous like table saws. But a programming language?

Anyway, the "deal with it"/"get good" mentality just seems like a lack of empathy. Not to mention the arrogant in-group thing of "oh, you don't know <wart x> of my favourite but flawed language? you must not be a good dev". And the fact that fixing something like this could cumulatively save a huge amount of brainpower for current and future devs.

The hilarious thing about the get-good arguments is that it's proponents don't realize that they're talking about expending effort _for nothing in return_, especially in cases like the server-side where nobody is forced to use Javascript.

You can say the same thing to Pythonistas who are fussed by memory management, but the tradeoff of that intuitiveness is performance (which is being somewhat obviated by newer languages like Rust, which have their own challenges to learn). The actual task you're trying to do is more complex, so the knowledge required is too.

In Javascript's case, the thing you're becoming an expert in is the path-dependent history of dumb language decisions by people who never should have been let anywhere near a language. It's beyond me that people don't understand why this would bug some, at the very least because it was so easily avoidable.

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