Comment by qalmakka | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qalmakka | Hacker News Reader

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I think that the big mistake PHP and JS made was to loosely pick their weak typing from Perl while trying to look too much like Java. Perl has different operators for numeric and string equality, so you know that `$a == "3"` would convert both its arguments to number and then compare them, while `$a eq "3"` would convert them both as strings and run a character comparison on them. Using == for both was kind of asking for people to get confused and mess up, IMHO.

I’ve never used Perl but I periodically mistake eq and = in bash scripts. It’s quite annoying since there’s no obvious indication that one is for numbers and one is for strings.

There's no obvious indication what the standard C function

  void (*signal(int sig, void (*func)(int)))(int)

means; if you don't know C it's plain gibberish, impossible to fully understand.

Everything in computers (and I may say, more in general in life) is based on assumptions made on knowledge we implicitly have. After a while, writing eq or == becomes natural and you stop mixing them up. These kinds of errors are frequent when you don't use something daily; for instance, after more than a decade I still keep forgetting Powershell's syntax because I don't use it often and when I do, I tend to do basic things.

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