The problem here is that + is used for both addition and concatenation. Most of the time you know what you are doing though (smile) and string is the default. When I started out with JavaScript I used -- (minus minus) for addition just to be safe. If you where to compare "22" == 22 ? it would be true, so the type doesn't really matter. If you want to do arithmetics on a string, no problem! Even null behaves like a teddy bear compared to other languages where it can bite you hard. Also note that this child toy language can run on embedded systems, and doing memory safe IO concurrency is so easy it's hard not to, like oops I did ten thousand concurrent request, but it finished in less then a second, because this is 2016 and not 1986 and computing performance and memory has grown exponentially since. Don't get me wrong though, systems languages has their place in lower level where the bits, bytes and performance matters. Someone once told me that JavaScript is a lot like assembly because you are so free, there is no one telling you "No, you shouldn't do it that way" like in Rust.