<story><title>JavaScript-algorithms: Algorithms and data structures implemented in JavaScript</title><url>https://github.com/trekhleb/javascript-algorithms</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kamranjon</author><text>&amp;quot;4&amp;quot; + 4 = &amp;quot;44&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;44&amp;quot; - 4 = 40</text></item><item><author>user3939382</author><text>&amp;gt; I tend to think of Javascript as the language that fulfills the promises that BASIC never did&lt;p&gt;I taught myself BASIC when I was 7 when I didn&amp;#x27;t know what a programming language was.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been programming JS for 25 years and I still commonly can&amp;#x27;t predict what the behavior of some aspects of my code is going to be, or what the state of the application is at a given point, until I try&amp;#x2F;run it.</text></item><item><author>sublinear</author><text>I would like to point out that a possible reason this repo is so popular is that Javascript is more accessible to more people than any other programming language today and this shows the demand to meet these programmers halfway and help further their education. I think most js devs know Javascript is a poor choice for this, but they have to walk before they can run.&lt;p&gt;I tend to think of Javascript as the language that fulfills the promises that BASIC never did.&lt;p&gt;If every student walking into a computer science course only knew Javascript, that would still be a massive improvement over the past where half the students didn&amp;#x27;t know any programming language at all or only some vastly underpowered ones like Logo or BASIC.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cxr</author><text>People love to trot out examples like this while remaining totally silent about why they&amp;#x27;re trying to add&amp;#x2F;subtract numbers and strings in the first place or articulate what they expected to happen when they did it.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;On two occasions I have been asked, &amp;quot;Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?&amp;quot; [...] I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.&lt;/i&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>JavaScript-algorithms: Algorithms and data structures implemented in JavaScript</title><url>https://github.com/trekhleb/javascript-algorithms</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kamranjon</author><text>&amp;quot;4&amp;quot; + 4 = &amp;quot;44&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;44&amp;quot; - 4 = 40</text></item><item><author>user3939382</author><text>&amp;gt; I tend to think of Javascript as the language that fulfills the promises that BASIC never did&lt;p&gt;I taught myself BASIC when I was 7 when I didn&amp;#x27;t know what a programming language was.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been programming JS for 25 years and I still commonly can&amp;#x27;t predict what the behavior of some aspects of my code is going to be, or what the state of the application is at a given point, until I try&amp;#x2F;run it.</text></item><item><author>sublinear</author><text>I would like to point out that a possible reason this repo is so popular is that Javascript is more accessible to more people than any other programming language today and this shows the demand to meet these programmers halfway and help further their education. I think most js devs know Javascript is a poor choice for this, but they have to walk before they can run.&lt;p&gt;I tend to think of Javascript as the language that fulfills the promises that BASIC never did.&lt;p&gt;If every student walking into a computer science course only knew Javascript, that would still be a massive improvement over the past where half the students didn&amp;#x27;t know any programming language at all or only some vastly underpowered ones like Logo or BASIC.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mdp2021</author><text>True, and apparently counterintuitive if presented that way, but it makes sense as &amp;#x27;+&amp;#x27; is a string concatenation operator. It is the type conversion that can be used in unclear contexts - it can be comfortable and also dangerous.</text></comment>