I swear, JavaScript equality is out here trying to gaslight me.
Today, I had a value that printed as 0 in the console… but my if (value == 0) check was somehow skipping.
Turns out, it was “0” from some form field.
== said “yeah, same same”, I said “nah fam, not today”.
Then my brain went back to the classics that still hurt:
NaN === NaN → false (who hurt you, NaN?)
typeof null → “object” (bro, we’ve been carrying this L since before I was born)
and the one that made me close VS Code for 10 minutes: [] ==![] → true 😭
I eventually wrote the post I needed when I was losing my mind over this stuff years ago:
why == is basically playing matchmaker with types,
Why most of us just live on === now,
the one sneaky situation where loose equality is actually cleaner,
and why <a href="http://Object.is" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">Object.is</a>() exists for the people who actually care about -0 vs +0 (not me… yet).
If JS equality has ever made you want to throw your laptop into the Gulf of Guinea, tell me your worst one below.
Misery loves company.
I have sat down to write a breakdown with the cursed examples if you want: <a href="https://blog.al-husayn.dev/blog/equality-operators" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">https://blog.al-husayn.dev/blog/equality-operators</a>
Dropping the link in comments if you’re ready to hate JavaScript a little more today

Al-Hussein Abubakar

A lighthearted look at JavaScript's equality quirks, covering the difference between == (loose equality with type coercion) and === (strict equality), plus edge cases like NaN === NaN returning false, typeof null being 'object', and [] == ![] being true. Also touches on Object.is() for handling -0 vs +0 comparisons.

JavaScript Equality: == vs === Explained

<a href="https://blog.al-husayn.dev/blog/equality-operators" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">https://blog.al-husayn.dev/blog/equality-operators</a>