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Comment by amenbrother | Hacker News Reader

Those languages are far more maintainable and their communities have far more respect for practices which prevent programming errors.

I don't particularly care how many forms of equality or comparison a language has as long as the compiler or runtime is capable of telling me the particular one I'm using is probably wrong. If == can't be used with strings the damn interpreter should tell me so instead of silently and improperly coercing the arguments.

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The interpreter does tell you.

    $ perl -e 'use warnings; use strict; print "content" == "foo", "\n"'
    Argument "foo" isn't numeric in numeric eq (==) at -e line 1.
    Argument "content" isn't numeric in numeric eq (==) at -e line 1.
    1

Thanks - I'll try to remember that if I ever have to touch perl again.

You should have used strict and warnings. RTFM, I know.

Btw, Java will silently compare references instead of value. Learning a language != increasing vocabulary.

Tell me about it. At least Python can make the difference between equality and identity, while a non-overriden equals() in Java actually means "is X Y?" instead of "is X equal to Y?".

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