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Discussion on: Why do we write JavaScript like this?

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pentacular profile image
pentacular

I recently had a discussion where people claimed that object values were references.

I asked the people if they could point to something in the ecmascript standard to support this, but there was complete silence, except from one person who said that they couldn't make sense of the standard.

I am starting to get the feeling that people are largely learning in an echo chamber of well meaning, but often fundamentally confused tutorials, and in many cases aren't functionally literate in CS, which may kind of explain what you're observing.

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aleksandrhovhannisyan profile image
Aleksandr Hovhannisyan

Yeah, I blame lack of CS literacy here. Object values are memory addresses. "References" are pointers. This misunderstanding stems from a lack of exposure to languages like C++/Rust, where you're forced to understand what pointers are and how they're used.

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johnkazer profile image
John Kazer

Makes me think of an interesting split of opinion or approach or maybe programming temperament.

Some folk focus on the logic of what they are trying to achieve, they like functions and hate pointers. Others like to know more about what the computer is actually doing, they love pointers and benchmarking.

I'm being simplistic but it made me wonder...