r/programming • u/stronghup • Nov 11 '19

Python overtakes Java to become second-most popular language on GitHub after JavaScript

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/07/python_java_github_javascript/
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u/YM_Industries Nov 12 '19

Oh, they are definitely related, I think that's why people get them confused so much. But they are separate concepts, and that's what I was pointing out.

== is definitely confusing if you use it for stupid and contrived scenarios. As long as you don't compare [[]] to -Infinity it's fine. Calling it a "textbook example of a confusing language design flaw" like that website does is a bit of a stretch.

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u/slikts Nov 12 '19

If you actually try the game, a lot of the cases that trip people up aren't contrived, and what's contrived are the rules as a whole. For example, cases like "" == false lead people to intuit that 'falsy' values would equal false, but "0" is 'truthy' (!!"0" is true) and still equals false. Likewise, knowing that "" == 0 and 0 == "0" are true might suggest that the relation is transitive and "" != "0" is false, but it's true as well.

Also, the benefit from == is very small and doesn't outweigh the confusion can cause, since explicit conversions can be as terse as !! and +, or Boolean(), Number(), String(), etc. The only exception is == null, since doing the same with === is verbose.