Programming languages are repeatedly touted to have strange edge cases. Bugbears. Footguns. Wats. The canonical 'wat' talk shows some of these for Ruby and JavaScript, but doesn’t go into any detail into the ‘why’
In this talk, take a tour of a dozen different programming languages, from Python to Perl, JavaScript to Haskell, Elixir and more; and see not only the 'wat', but the 'why': is it a misunderstanding based on assumption from another programming language? A compiler optimisation? A known bug that can't be fixed due to backwards compatibility concerns?
Attendees will come away from this talk with a greater understanding about how to turn a 'wat' into a 'why'.
