I mean they clearly don't have to, Python has the same problem of being able to pass anything—you don't see this kind of incredibly defensive programming. But Python set a culture of being for "consenting adults" where it's expected that callers will read the docs and ensure preconditions are satisfied, and if they don't whatever happens, happens.

It leads to less code, and more generalizable code. Maybe the caller does know what they're doing, who am I to say they can't.

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pcwelder 14 hours ago | parent [-]

>if they don't whatever happens, happens

What happens is you get an error. So you immediately know something is wrong.

Javascript goes the extra mile to avoid throwing errors.

So you've 3>"2" succeeding in Javascript but it's an exception in python. This behavior leads to hard to catch bugs in the former.

Standard operators and methods have runtime type checks in python and that's what examples in the article are replicating.

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recursivecaveat 13 hours ago | parent [-]

It's so strange to me that JS goes so far to avoid errors, mashing random stuff into strings or NaNs, misspelled variables just become undefined, etc. Then when your off-the rails program reaches `undefined()` it's "woah woah woah, that's clearly nonsense, stop program execution right this instant". I feel like I could respect it a little more if they committed to "a webpage should never crash under any circumstances" and there were just no exceptions in the language whatsoever.

	▲	watwut 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It has nothing to do with the wish to not crash page. Javascript was a prototype that was supposed to be refined and cleaned. Then management said "we will ship it now" and it was shipped as it was. At the time, they thought it will be used for small things, minor snippets on web page. Webapps as we have them were not a thing yet.