Good old JS, because exceptions are a sin.
this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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I've seen code in my workplace using parseInt to round JS Number. Made me cringe coming from system programing but I didn't see the danger.
It's sad the only way to prevent such a bad code in production is to use transpilers.
looks functional to me. Its a pure function, right?
If anyone's wondering why:
>> 0.000005
0.000005
>> 0.0000005
5e-7
Yup. parseInt is for strings.
Math.floor, Math.ceil, Math.round or Math.trunc are for numeric type "conversions" (cause its still a float)
Nah, it's stupid either way.
"5e-7" is not an int to be parsed. Neither is "0.5".
People give JS a lot of shit. And I do too. But it's meant to continue running and not fail like C code would. It's meant to basically go "yeah, sure I'll fuck with that" and keep trucking.
So you can always make it do stupid shit when you use it a stupid way.
Is this bad? Maybe. Was it the intention of the language? Absolutely.
Typescript fixes a lot of these headaches. But I feel like JS is doing exactly what it was meant to do. Keep trucking even when the programmer asks it to do stupid shit.
If you're using JS and don't understand this then it's your fault and not the languages fault.
Do we all want to live in a world of typedefs as strict as C and have our webpages crash with the slightest unexpected char input? Probably not.
We don't notice all the time JS goes "yeah I can fuck with that" and it works perfectly. We only notice the times it does that and it results in something silly.
TLDR: JS does what it was made to do. And because of that it looks absolutely ridiculous sometimes.
The REAL problem is that the industry collectively uses JS almost exclusively for shit it was never meant to do. Like you say, it's intended for it to not throw errors and kill your whole web page, because it was only ever intended to be used for minor scripts inside mostly-static HTML and CSS web pages. Then we all turned it into the most-popular language in the world for building GUI applications.
It’s meant to basically go “yeah, sure I’ll fuck with that” and keep trucking.
Yet, it lives in an insulated environment, with plenty of infrastructure to make sure errors do not propagate, with a standard error handling functionality on the spotlight with specialized syntax, and with plenty of situations where it just drops the ball and throws an error.
Nope, not falling for the gaslight. It's a stupid feature that's there because the language was created during a week and the author was trying to juggle the requirement of a rigid and typed semantics that looked like Java with his desire to make a flexible single-typed language that looks like Lisp.
And nobody fixed it, decades later, because everybody keeps repeating your line that the interpreter must always keep on.
My main issue with JS is you can use it wrong, and it pretends to work, and often looks like it works.
But then shits its pants explosively the second you fall outside that.
People forget that crashes are a debugging tool indicating an error. Silent errors can be much more dangerous. C and C++ in particular need to be careful not to overwrite random memory for example.
Yes the consequences for JS failures are less severe and so JS can get away with it, but a crash is a way to know your program isn't doing what you thought it was, properly.
It just so happens that JS is used in contexts where nobody really cares, and errors aren't a big deal, cheap and fast wins.
That's not why JS is a big pile of crap. It's because the language was not thought through at the beginning (I don't blame the inventors for that) and because of the web it spread like wildfire and only backwards compatible changes could be made. Even if will all your points in mind the language could be way nicer. My guess is that once wasm/wasi is integrated enough to run websites without JS (dom access, etc.) JS will be like Fortran, Cobol and Telefax - not going away any time soon, but practically obsolete.
Javascript: "They're the same thing"
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What language is that so I can avoid it.
lol it’s js of course
We all know what it is.
I know this is for fun, but as general advice to the homies, if a language or system is doing something you didn't expect, make sure to look at the documentation
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/parseInt
This will save a lot of time and headaches
oh god the reason is even stupider then I expected
Because large numbers use the
echaracter in their string representation (e.g.,6.022e23for 6.022 × 1023), usingparseIntto truncate numbers will produce unexpected results when used on very large or very small numbers.parseIntshould not be used as a substitute forMath.trunc().
Holy fuck that is long. When the documentation for the integer parsing function is 10 pages long, there's something seriously wrong with the language
Is it? I've seen longer articles for C# and not as many complaints about it.
Probably not an article about integer parsing, though. If the docs are that long, then because Microsoft does have a tendency to be overly verbose for things they think you need, just to have no docs for the stuff you actually need.
For reference here's the relevant rust docs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment
...and of course JS made it into the examples, how could it not:
A programming language's standard library usually provides a function similar to the pseudocode ParseInteger(string, radix), which creates a machine-readable integer from a string of human-readable digits. The radix conventionally defaults to 10, meaning the string is interpreted as decimal (base 10). This function usually supports other bases, like binary (base 2) and octal (base 8), but only when they are specified explicitly. In a departure from this convention, JavaScript originally defaulted to base 8 for strings beginning with "0", causing developer confusion and software bugs. This was discouraged in ECMAScript 3 and dropped in ECMAScript 5.
Okay but this documentation is obviously wrong from the first sentence
The parseInt() function parses a string argument and returns an integer of the specified radix
Integers don't have radices. It should read:
The parseInt() function parses a string argument representing an integer of the specified radix and returns that integer.
~~Either way, I still don't understand the behaviour in the image.~~ nvm, thanks m_f@discuss.online
I'd advise to always look into the corresponding documentation before using something from any library.
But I'm too busy being confused by the behaviors of libraries I previously didn't read the documentation for, to read the documentation for every new library I adopt.
(This is sarcasm...mostly.)
I'll go with 5 hours of debugging, thank you very much!
It's because parseInt is expecting a string, so the decimal gets converted to a string, and 0.0000005.toString() returns 5e-7.
Common Dynamic Typing L
More like javascript L, even python would throw a TypeError for this example.
And to further expand on that, if you do pass in a ~~sting~~ string, it handles it correctly.
> parseInt('0.0000005')
0
What if I pass in a Sterwart Copeland?
or a Honda civic
😆 I'll be watching you...
Another classic javascript wat
Classic people who don't know how to code wat. Passing a number in place of a string argument because they don't know what they're doing.
Javascript could throw an error to alert you that the input is supposed to be a string, like most languages would do.
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It's not a string argument though, it's JS. You can argue it's expected to be a string but like the rest of JS all you can know from the signature alone is that it takes an object. Hopefully your little ducky quacks the right way!
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Could be a variable from somewhere else in the code. It should throw type error of some sort if it's not going to handle a float correctly
Agreed, functions in general should do this, and some do. But it should probably be automatic. And the variable argument is a good one, a very good argument for TypeScript. ❤️
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Great feature
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