A large part of the problems of Javascript are corollaries of lacking of a good standard library, and the relatively long time it took and is still taking to fix that.

It wasn't really until ES2015 that a better standard library really started to take shape, and, thanks to IE11, it was a very long time before that didn't need poly-filling.

In a sane world, you'd just parse whatever you're after and then check for NaN or null.

You can't do that. Pop open your favourite javascript runtime and type:

    Number.parseInt("123Garbage")