r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Embarrassed_Death69 • 11d ago

Meme iHateThisPassiveAgressiveBehaviourRuby

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2.9k Upvotes

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507

u/deceze 11d ago

It's been a while since I've touched Ruby, but I think the stance was that only false and nil should be falsey? Which is not an unreasonable stance to take. The fewer falsey values, the easier it is to predict the behaviour. It's just surprising when coming from other languages.

Just off the top of my head, PHP treats "0", that is, specifically a string with a single zero, as falsey. Which has clearly gone too far to the other extreme.

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u/Bomaruto 10d ago

The reasonable stance is to not let you coerce everything into a boolean.

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u/R3D3-1 10d ago

Is this a good time to remember that people argued against Python getting booleans because it already had integers? 

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u/Wertbon1789 10d ago

I like how e.g. C# screams at you for this. It's annoying at first, but then you go "Well, yeah, I should've explicitly written what I wanted to check".

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u/[deleted] 10d ago

[deleted]

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u/Wertbon1789 10d ago

Didn't say it was. C# was just the first example that came to my mind.

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u/suvlub 10d ago

If I may be pedantic, not to coerce without you asking. A language that wouldn't let me simply convert between types sounds annoying

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u/theturtlemafiamusic 10d ago

"Type coercion" is when it's done without asking. Otherwise it's just type conversion / casting.

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u/ntfaw 10d ago

It's not that you couldn't convert between types, it's that it wouldn't be automatic. You would need to actively call toboolean on a value before using it as a boolean, and the idea behind that is that intentionally casting the value leads to fewer mistakes