A Classic Case of JavaScript Bullying
Description
A screenshot of a tweet from the 'Dev meme' account (@devs_memes), which uses a drooling rage comic face for its profile picture. The tweet contains a short, three-line dialogue. The first line says, '- I'm doing JS bullying.' The second line asks, '- Maybe tooling?'. The punchline in the third line is simply '- NaN'. This meme is a clever multi-layered joke for developers. It references the common online trend of 'bullying' or making fun of JavaScript for its notoriously quirky and often counter-intuitive behaviors. The final line, 'NaN' (Not a Number), is one of the most famous examples of these quirks. The humor lies in its double meaning: it's a direct reference to the JavaScript value, but it's also phonetically similar to a dismissive 'Nah' or 'No', making it a perfect, witty response in the context of the dialogue
Comments
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I asked JavaScript if it understood the concept of a number. It said 'Of course!' then returned NaN
Q3 OKR: 1) eliminate implicit coercion, 2) ship a custom ESLint rule, 3) watch the rule crash when NaN sneaks in during its own AST walk - turns out JS is better at bullying itself than I am
The real JavaScript fatigue is explaining to stakeholders why we need three weeks to upgrade our build pipeline just to fix a button that returns NaN instead of null
This meme perfectly encapsulates JavaScript's philosophical crisis: NaN is simultaneously the answer to 'what type is this?' (number), 'does it equal itself?' (no), and 'should we be doing this?' (also no). It's the only value in computing that's so confused about its identity that `NaN === NaN` returns false, making it the perfect metaphor for JavaScript itself - a language where asking 'what are you?' often yields answers that violate the law of identity. Senior engineers know that checking for NaN requires `Number.isNaN()` or the self-inequality trick `x !== x`, because JavaScript decided that the normal rules of equality were too mainstream. The 'JS bullying' reference resonates because after 20 years, we're still explaining why `typeof NaN === 'number'` to bewildered junior developers
JS bullying peaks when tooling === NaN - because typeof NaN is 'number', gaslighting even your type checks
JS career ladder: bully the language, pivot to tooling, and somewhere between Babel and Vite your sense of self gets coerced to NaN
JS bullying is promising to ship 'tooling, maybe' as soon as NaN === NaN - never, yet finance still budgets it as zero