It's perhaps badly named, but it's also the only way it could work in practice. A general facility for expanding any logged object to arbitrary depths would be prohibitively expensive to implement with static snapshots.
It's more that the way that the console reflects how the language works, and the console is not a log, it's a REPL (so console.output would have been a nicer name than console.log).
I think it would be more confusing if the console did not work like the rest of the language does.
> It's more that the way that the console reflects how the language works, and the console is not a log, it's a REPL (so console.output would have been a nicer name than console.log).
That is entirely irrelevant. The primary purpose of `console.log` is and has always be to generate output from normal, non-interactive programs.
And it's completely wrong, `console.log` was absolutely intended as a logging method, as evidenced by its siblings `debug`, `info`, `warn` and `error`, pretty much like every logging API out there.
It's also ahistorical revisionism "the console" was added very late into the history of the language, it and the entire console API were added by Firebug in the mid aughts. The language had been a thing for a decade at that point.
> I think it would be more confusing if the console did not work like the rest of the language does.
It would be the exact opposite. When I try to output something, my intent is to show the state of that thing at that point. That JS consoles are lazy (and even deferred) has systematically been a pain point and a pain in the ass leading to eager deep cloning to ensure I can see what I actually have on hand at that point, especially in mutation-heavy code.
I'm absolutely certain the number of times I've considered the behaviour a feature rather than an annoyance is 0.
What I expect to happen when I do `console.log(obj)` is that it called `obj.toString()` which means I'd expect it to print `[object Object]` and that if I wanted to see all the values I'd have to either serialize the object `console.log(JSON.stringify(obj))` or manually generate a string `console.log(`field1: ${obj.field1}, field2: ${obj.field2}`);
The fact that the browser provides me this convenience of a link to an expandable live object is a bonus feature. I'm glad it doesn't try to deep copy the object. If it did it would make console.log useless because of the performance overhead.
If you want to capture all the fields then `console.log({...obj})` would work. But of course any of those fields that are references to objects will be live. I wouldn't expect any thing else. A print function shouldn't be required to figure out if your deep references are circular which would be required if you wanted deep copies.
