Booleans should be just True and false

TL;DR: Don't do magic castings to boolean. You will regret on a friday night.

Problems

• Hiding Errors

• Accidental complexity coupled to one particular language.

• Readability

• Difficulty to hop among languages.

• IFs

Solutions

1. Be explicit.

2. Work with booleans for boolean conditions. Not integers, not nulls, not strings, not lists. Just booleans.

3. Fail fast

Sample Code

Wrong

virus = ['MERS', 'SARS']
vaccines = []

if vaccines:
    print ("let's get vaccinated")
else:
    print ("We have no vaccines yet. Keep researching")

if virus:
    print ("There are some virus around. Take extra care")
else:
    print ("We are free to get out. Not masks are necessary")

#equivalent     

if not vaccines:
    print ("We have no vaccines yet. Keep researching")
else:
    print ("let's get vaccinated")

if not virus:
    print ("We are free to get out. Not masks are necessary")
else:
    print ("There are some virus around. Take extra care")

Right

if len(vaccines) == 0:
    print ("We have no vaccines yet. Keep researching")
else:
    print ("Let's get vaccinated")


if len(virus) == 0:
    print ("We are free to get out. Not masks are necessary")
else:
    print ("There are some virus around. Take extra care")

Detection

This is a language feature. Some strict languages show warnings with this magic wizardry.

Tags

• Coercions

• Primitive

Conclusion

Some languages encourage doing some magic abbreviations and automatic castings. This is a source of errors and a Premature Optimization warning.

We should always be as explicit as possible.

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Last update: 2021/07/07