Ah, OK. Good to know! I like that it’s explicit.

“The interesting thing about your post is not the simple bugs that people stumble on but the greater issue of whether a language should differentiate between null and zero/empty”

Exactly my point. In JavaScript the evaluation of a null, undefined, zero and empty string as a “falsy” value does just that; it classifies those values/types in one fell swoop as false. What I wanted to illustrate is that a (common) naive approach to determining default values where “0″ and “” are acceptable would trigger a false positive due to this language feature.

“Loose languages have strict equality (===) when needed…”

This is a good highlight of the dynamic nature of weak types in JavaScript. You can perform strict comparisons on types and values without coercion, which is usually recommended, but you can drop back to equality (==) if you need it.

if(x != “”)

but since null doesn’t equal an empty string, the safest method is

if(!String.IsNullOrEmpty(x))

This is the possibly most extreme case of strictness in a compiled language forcing you to explain your intent and making no assumptions. The interesting thing about your post is not the simple bugs that people stumble on but the greater issue of whether a language should differentiate between null and zero/empty. There are instances where zero is an answer, and null could imply that you elect not to answer the question. (ex: How many children to you have? 0, 1, 2, 3, more, I choose not to answer) Loose languages have strict equality (===) when needed, and I do find the excessive casting required for basic variables in C# to be a pain sometimes and it makes code more verbose. But it’s a small trade off.

-JP

“The Kool-Aid man is sort of expected… everyone wants to put their best foot forward.”
Being an evangelist for your company is expected, but what I was pointing out is more than that. It’s putting up a facade and ultimately lying about the points mentioned above.

-JP

“This will do for the web what spinners did for automobiles.”
Do you mean the full audio support in the browser? I see lots of interesting potential and capabilities that could open up. Of course with great power comes great responsibility. In fact, last week the W3C addressed this very topic by creating the W3C Audio Working Group.

-JP

One other point I would add is not to lead the interviewee on if you know it’s not going to work out. You shouldn’t scrutinize or embarrass them, like in this famous SNL skit, but a graceful, half-hearted “we’ll let you know” should get the point across.

string x = “”;
if (x) {
// do something…
}
—-
int y = 0;
if (y){
// do something…
}

Would those “if” conditions pass?
-JP

C#, possibly the strictest OOP language, disallows any implicit casting between basic value types. So you have to check if num==0 or str==”". Furthermore, string variables with a null value can throw exceptions if you attempt to perform any string function, such as checking .length. So they added the static String.IsNullOrEmpty(str) function as a safety net. Keep up the good work.