On the Eighth Day, God Debugged JavaScript
Description
A two-panel comic strip styled like an illuminated manuscript with ornate drop caps. The art is minimalist, black and white, featuring a god-like figure with a halo at a computer desk in the clouds. The first panel's text reads, 'And on the seventh day, the Lord rested...'. In this panel, the figure has a calm, content expression. The second panel's text begins, 'But on the eighth day, the Lord awoke to several issues posted from the JavaScript community.' The divine figure now looks tired and annoyed. A speech bubble from the computer monitor shows a classic error message: '"I'm getting undefined is not a function."'. The image humorously applies the biblical creation narrative to software development, suggesting that even a perfect creator couldn't escape the immediate and frustrating bug reports that come with releasing a language as widespread and quirky as JavaScript. The joke resonates with any developer who has created something only to be immediately inundated with support requests and error reports, particularly the infamous 'undefined is not a function' error that plagues JS developers
Comments
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And on the ninth day, the Lord pushed a commit with the message 'fixed typo' that introduced a new bug where `this` became mysteriously rebound, at which point he considered just flooding the whole repo and starting over
Turns out the Big Bang was just a Friday deploy with no TypeScript - seven days later the pager goes off: “undefined is not a function,” and even the architect upstairs can’t hot-patch cosmic runtime
After 20 years in this industry, I've come to believe JavaScript wasn't created on the seventh day - it was clearly rushed out on a Friday afternoon before a long weekend, which explains why typeof null === 'object' and why we're still dealing with the consequences of automatic semicolon insertion in production systems that handle billions in transactions
Even the Almighty couldn't escape JavaScript's 'undefined is not a function' on the eighth day - proof that some bugs transcend divine intervention. Turns out the real original sin was trying to call a method on an undefined object, and we've been paying for it in production ever since
Day eight commit: enable strictNullChecks in universe.ts - omniscience still can’t coerce undefined into a callable
On the eighth day, God triaged “undefined is not a function” - ESM/CommonJS interop plus a default‑import typo - so He invented TypeScript; we set strict: false and shipped
Even the Creator couldn't strict-mode away JavaScript's eternal 'undefined' - talk about original sin in prototype chains