For the types of functions you're talking about (ie. functions that return multiple values, of different types) I see it slightly differently than you seem to: I see the need/use of out params as ...

While JavaScript has many applications, working with string values is one of the most popular. Strings are objects within the JavaScript language. They are not stored as character arrays, so built ...

This very issue is one of my pet peeves of working in Java/C, because extract-function refactoring is severely inhibited by having only 1 return value, and it forces you to pass in mutable values ...