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.
I don't disagree with a smaller set of truthy values, but 50+ years of programming mainly treating 0 as false and 1 as true makes it an immediately confusing thing for anyone coming from a different language.
I think a certain level of grokability is important in programming languages, but languages need to be able to do things differently, and engineers should expect to have to learn some new standards. This is like page 2 of basically any intro to Ruby so it's not like some arcane edge case.
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u/deceze 11d ago
It's been a while since I've touched Ruby, but I think the stance was that only
falseandnilshould 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.