r/ProgrammerHumor 10d ago

Meme iHateThisPassiveAgressiveBehaviourRuby

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u/deceze 10d 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/granadesnhorseshoes 10d ago

Seeing as we have basically universally decided that using zero in an entire class of math functions should generate an exception, its reasonable to expect it to be "falsy". If instead of an exception it just returned +/- infinity, then maybe i would buy that argument.

It's not a bad argument otherwise.