Why is the purpose of using = in JavaScript?

As you're programming, when you want to assign value to a variable to use or change throughout the code, you use the = operator. The = operator is called the assignment operator, and there are many ways you can assign values to variables.

Example:

let x = 10;
let name = "Jhonny";
let nameList = [ "Lisa", "Mona", "Tim"]

If = means assigning values, what does == mean?

Now think if you want to compare x to name, how would you compare them to evaluate if the variables are of the same value. That is where the == operator comes in handy, this operator called the equality operator. The return value when using it is a Boolean(true or false), it is not strict so if you compare

1 == "1";   // true
x == "10";  // true
name == x;  // false

the return values vary. Not strict equality means that the equality operator will try to convert the values datatype before comparison happens.

What is strict equality?

Similar to the == equality operator, we have === strict equality operator. This works similarly except without trying to implicitly convert the variables values, it compares it strictly to the value and the value datatype and also returns a Boolean.

For example:

x === 10;        //true
x === "10"       // false
name === "Lisa"  //false

If the values are not similar, it will not convert them therefore the result will false.

I hope this helps, I wanted to make it very simple and down to the basics.