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Comment by b0rsuk | Hacker News Reader

Few people do that outside of code obfuscation contests, but the point is JS has heaps of gotchas like that, each waiting to bite you. How about:

x = 5;

(no var declaration). Extremely easy to do by accident. Lots of these will be left for backwards compatibility. In JS errors often go silent and I developed a strong dislike for any language that does that, including Vimscript and Lua (and I do like Vim).

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I'd agree that global declaration is far more egregious. A sibling comment recommends a linter, and I'd probably agree. It's sad that it was ever allowed as one that is copying and pasting code to another location can easily cause this case to happen.

Problems like this can be easily caught by linters like eslint or standardjs.

No JS developer would do that.

We all know that is global.

Nowadays you use `const` or `let`.

Any JS developer will have a linter that will tell them incase they somehow made that mistake.

Eh, I actually like JS but I have definitely forgotten to add a "var" or "let" a few times, or sometimes I will do it correctly, get a bit overzealous with cutting, and accidentally remove the initial var declaration.

I'm not saying that it breaks the language, but it definitely is irritating, especially if you're not using a linter.

I come from Lua so I'm used to declaring local variables with "local".

Also, I like knowing which variables won't be reassigned (const), and which will (let).

Whilst I do find it irritating, I don't mind about the scope default so much, but I've certainly run into it (forgetting to specify) a lot.

Mostly because JS is not the only language that I'll be working with at a time, and if I'm dancing between three or four and they have similar syntax, then mistakes creep in.

That's all fine, but those are all workarounds for a design mistake in the language.

No it's a choice, apparently people can't have one.

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