Weird-Js

This year I decided to solve the famous Advent of Code Challenge in both Python and JavaScript. I’m also gonna be posting my solutions on my GitHub repository. And while solving today’s advent of code challenge, in javascript. I came across a weird behaviour of the sort() function in javascript. I was trying to sort an array of numbers, and I was using the sort function like this: const myArray = myArray.sort(); then I console.log()ed it to see the result, and it was sorted in ascending order. But when I tried to sort it in descending order, it didn’t work. I tried to do this: ...

This small blog was sparked by a post that I saw: There are many posts like the above on the internet, and almost all of them are because of this type coercion thingy. So in this blog, I’m gonna try to explain what type coercion is and what’s happening in that post 😉. What is type coercion? There are 6 primitive data types in JavaScript: undefined, Boolean, Number, String, BigInt and Symbol. When you try to do things like adding two different data types together, JavaScript uses some rules to decide how it’s gonna coerce one type into the other type, to actually add them together. ...