JavaScript’s Next Evolution: “use stricter”;

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

The introduction of “use strict”; greatly cleaned up the language, but there’s still some pain points to eliminate. I think JavaScript is ready for “use stricter”;!

Disclaimer: This is not a real or upcoming feature of JavaScript, just my wishlist.

Stricter JavaScript

• Optional chaining and function invocation by default. ?., ?[], and ?() are no longer necessary. Still want to blow up the whole app when traversing goes awry? Use the coalescing operator: uh.oh.spaghettio ?? throw new Error(‘burn it down’);.
• null === undefined. Then you only have to check one value. Why the hell are there two “empty” values anyway?!
• typeof null === ‘undefined’. In keeping with the above point.
• 0 is truthy. NaN is the only falsy number we need.
• Nothing coerces to a number. Use parseInt and parseFloat to coerce strings.
• + is only for addition, not string concatenation. Use template literals instead.
• Array.prototype.indexOf returns NaN (a falsy value!) for no matches, not -1.
• No Automatic Semicolon Insertion. Stop being lazy, developers.
• Only strict equality is allowed. == does the same as ===.
• parseInt radix always defaults to 10. I mean, how many times have you meant for it to be 8 or 16?

Was there anything I missed? We can always put those things in the next breaking change of JavaScript: “use strictest”; 😆