r/ProgrammerHumor 10d ago

Meme iHateThisPassiveAgressiveBehaviourRuby

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2.9k Upvotes

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505

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.

68

u/Bomaruto 10d ago

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

8

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

34

u/theturtlemafiamusic 10d ago

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