When my console throws a NaN I kinda think of it as an Halloween kid receiving a fruit instead of a candy. They won’t say “That’s a fruit”. They’ll say “That’s not a treat”.
I’m personally pissed more often by a falsy 0.
Did you know that early analog computers would literally explode when asked to divide by 0?
Now computers just say “Hey stupid, that shit is not even a Number in a mathematical sense, but sure I’ll add one to it.” instead of “Why would you kill me like this?”
You can’t really define Infinity as a number, yet it is part of their world.
So typeof NaN === ‘number’ totally makes sense in that regard.
If you ever worked with arrays of dates, don’t judge NaN too harshly.
It works with everything except of course for falsy values
myThing.number = someNumberThatShouldNotBeEqualToZero
if (myThing.number) {
// do something very important with that number that should not be equal to zero
}
// This can fail at anytime without warning
So you’ve got to be extra careful with that logic when you’re dealing with numbers.
I am not saying it’s wrong though. I’m saying it’s often annoying.
NaN is of type number. because fuck me.
To be fair, this is actually reasonable. But it does look stupid on the face of it.
When my console throws a NaN I kinda think of it as an Halloween kid receiving a fruit instead of a candy. They won’t say “That’s a fruit”. They’ll say “That’s not a treat”.
I’m personally pissed more often by a falsy 0.
Did you know that early analog computers would literally explode when asked to divide by 0?
Now computers just say “Hey stupid, that shit is not even a Number in a mathematical sense, but sure I’ll add one to it.” instead of “Why would you kill me like this?”
You can’t really define Infinity as a number, yet it is part of their world.
So typeof NaN === ‘number’ totally makes sense in that regard.
If you ever worked with arrays of dates, don’t judge NaN too harshly.
Falsy zero? What’s wrong with that, 1 is true and 0 is false. I thought that was standard logic?
in javascript a property is truthy if it exists
myThing.property = "some string" if (myThing.property) { // true // do something }It works with everything except of course for falsy values
myThing.number = someNumberThatShouldNotBeEqualToZero if (myThing.number) { // do something very important with that number that should not be equal to zero } // This can fail at anytime without warningSo you’ve got to be extra careful with that logic when you’re dealing with numbers.
I am not saying it’s wrong though. I’m saying it’s often annoying.
ah ok , I think I write this a bit more verbose when using other languages, instead of
if(thing) { stuff; }I do
if(thing != null) { stuff; }so checking for numbers being truthy & existing didn’t seem like an issue