I find it hard to believe anyone has spent a bunch of time writing js and never been bitten by a type conversion. Am I wildly off base?
I do data science, but everyone who writes R has been bitten by it's scoping rules, which are definitely not mainstream. Everyone I know who writes java or python has been bitten at least once by the pass object references by value (is there a better name for this?) function argument semantics. Everyone who writes java has accidentally written == when they meant .equals and stared at the code for far too long. etc etc etc You just can't claim you can competently use a language without understanding some basics, like how functions work, how arguments are passed, and how equality is decided.
Which is the reason I would be deeply annoyed by the 4 == '4' question. The technical answer is it evaluates to true, but the real answer is "any code that requires all readers to have intimate knowledge of Javascript type conversion rules to read and understand is horrific code."
At the same time though, as someone looking for their first dev job, I'm not going to tell the interviewer "don't do that." Given the people I've met in industry, I can't see that ending well- I would expect some variation of "who does this kid think he is!?"
I do data science, but everyone who writes R has been bitten by it's scoping rules, which are definitely not mainstream. Everyone I know who writes java or python has been bitten at least once by the pass object references by value (is there a better name for this?) function argument semantics. Everyone who writes java has accidentally written == when they meant .equals and stared at the code for far too long. etc etc etc You just can't claim you can competently use a language without understanding some basics, like how functions work, how arguments are passed, and how equality is decided.