hi @Lady i just got rage-baited by some very poor javascript criticism would you also like to be annoyed by it

@wallhackio @Lady she’s playing Leyendas Pokémon: Arceus but i will read it to her if you want

@Satsuma @Lady 'tis a video

@wallhackio @Satsuma 🫵 zoomer

@Lady @Satsuma Here, have a transcription of the most appalling part of the video:

Author: "And why is nearly everything an object? Why is Strings objects? Why are numbers objects? They're just numbers. Like I get that it's for method but does NaN need to be an object?"

[screen shows author using the node.js REPL calling the valueOf method of NaN]

Author: "Why would anyone want to get the value of something that explicitly states it isn't a number?"

[Cut to screenshot of freecodecamp.org's description of JavaScript which claims that "JavaScript is not a class-based object-oriented language".]

Author: "Any many argue that JavaScript isn't object-oriented."

[cut to screenshot of towardsdatascience.com's description of JavaScript which claims that "Nearly everything in JavaScript is an object".]

Author: "Looks pretty-object oriented to me... And why is that functions are also classes? That's what [ES6] classes are for."

@wallhackio @Satsuma honestly thinking everything is an object is imagining javascript to be simpler and more consistent than it actually is

@Lady @Satsuma are there technically some values that aren't objects? I thought it was objects all the way down

@wallhackio @Satsuma no, strings, numbers, etc in javascript are explicitly not objects, they are literal (immutable) values

this is why `"foo" === String("foo")` but `"foo" !== new String("foo")`; the result of a new expression is always an object, whereas the result of `String("foo")` is a literal string value

cf. the `typeof` operator

the purpose of valueOf is to get the literal value of a wrapped object type, so `"foo" === (new String("foo")).valueOf()`

@Lady @Satsuma okay let me clarify my confusion then. If I have a value of number type I can call Object.getPrototypeOf on that number and get the Number.prototype object.

I can call methods and access properties on the number as well.

In general things we call primitives in JavaScript has property access and is in a prototype chain (although now that I think about it im sure undefined and null don't fit into this).

I was under the impression that values are containers for information that allow property access semantics, and that all values in the language participate in this, and the language makes a very poor decision of overloading the term "object" to simultaneously refer to one of 1) the fundamental container type that (all?) values in JavaScript are 2) non-null types that typeof tells you are "object" 3) instances of ES6 classes