Douglas Crockford: The State and Future of JavaScript
Why Stack Overflow recommends it
Stack Overflow users link it when explaining JavaScript's number semantics, decimal arithmetic limits and why ECMAScript has no integer type.
Recommended by 2 people across 2 different months, 2010 to 2015.
What it is
A 2009 YUIConf talk in which Yahoo! JavaScript architect Douglas Crockford walks through how ECMAScript 5 was developed and where the language might go next. He spends a long stretch on the Number type and the lack of decimal support.
What people said
Recommends Halcyon · 2011-08 · Stack Overflow · on “Automatically created variables from ids in JS?”
ECMAScript 5 strict should help with this as you cannot use undeclared variables [LINK] . I'm not sure which browsers currently support strict mode but I know Firefox 4 does. The HTML spec you linked mentions a proposal to reduce pollution of the global scope by limiting this behavior to quirks-only [LINK] . I don't know if this feature is in the original spec but I do expect it to be removed, prohibited or otherwise nullified in subsequent versions of ECMAScript. ES6 will be based on ES5 strict. JavaScript has many features that make it easier to use for beginners and novices, I suspect this is one such feature. If you're a professional and you want quality code use "use strict"; and always
Recommends MinusFour · 2015-08 · Stack Overflow · on “Why does ECMA script offer no integer type out of the box?”
Can't really speak for Harmony, Douglas Crockford, said that they were interested in adding another number type in future editions of ES. However, he also said that adding a new number type was doing violence to the language, that the simplicity of the language was desirable. [this video] He basically starts talking about "Number" from 13:52 to 26:00
Cites Mr. X · 2010-08 · Stack Overflow · on “JavaScript: Decimal Values”
What can I use as a decimal type in JavaScript? It's not supported ( 0.1 + 0.2 !== 0.3 ), and I need it for representing exact values in a banking/financial application. See The State and Future of JavaScript [this video] for a good read and the dirty details behind JavaScript and it's (lack of) support for decimal arithmetic. By "decimal", I mean either: infinite-range and arbitrary-precision (like BigDecimal in Java), or limited range and precision, but suitable for financial calculations (like decimal in C#). So, what library or solution exists for working with decimal values? Thanks!
Cites max · 2015-08 · Stack Overflow · on “Why does ECMA script offer no integer type out of the box?”
I think the political infighting which killed ES4 - particularly IBM's childlike but successful attempt to bomb the whole process unless `IEEE 754r DEC128` was included dissuaded TC39 from mucking about with any of the number types in Harmony. Just a theory though. [this video]