Value assigned to primitive will be lost

Question

If I have an array of objects, and loop through them assigning a value to an attribute for each one, WebStorm warns me:

Values assigned to primitive w

Answer 1

There's nothing improper in your code, WebStorm's type inference is getting a bit confused (this aspect of JavaScript is particularly confusing).

Its linter sees a string and assumes you will try something like this:

var primitive = "september";
primitive.vowels = 3;

primitive.vowels;
// => undefined

Which would lead to a 'lost' value.

The fact that it only catches this 'error' inside of a function seems like an outright bug that should be reported.

To further understand this weird part of JavaScript, I recommend Angus Croll's excellent in-depth article here.