know the features of your language

People ITT hating on null coalescing operators need to touch grass. Null coalescing and null conditional (string?.Trim()) are immensely useful and quite readable. One only has to be remotely conscious of edge cases where they can impair readability, which is true of every syntax feature

My coworker flips his shit every time I include a ternary operator in a PR. He also insists on refactoring any block of code longer than two lines into its own function, even when it's only used once.

He is not well liked.

And no one on his team ever understood his code.

Sometimes being declarative is better than being "smart"

Ruby:

a || b

(no return as last line is returned implicitly, no semicolon)

EDIT: As pointed out in the comments, this is not strictly equivalent, as it will return b if a is false as well as if it's nil (these are the only two falsy values in Ruby).

I enjoy this:

return a.or(b);

But yeah, that requires an Option type rather than null pointers...

a.unwrap_or(b)

There's a nice list of this feature by language on the Wikipedia page for anyone interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_coalescing_operator#Examples_by_languages

Loads of beginners in this thread. Here's how it's done in the industry.

The code:

return a;

The test:

a = rand()%100+1;

It works, boss.

(or a b)

i never thought of lisp as concise before

I’m learning swift and I actually just discovered ?? today. Am I missing out in other languages?

For the love of god, please do not use single-line alternatives to braced scopes. It's only tolerable in lambdas like Array.map( v => v**2 ). It's not for an implicit scope. It's for evaluating a return value.

But holy shit is it nice to have ?. in Javascript. It's such an anything-goes language until you look at it funny and it just shits the bed and silently dies. Hate hate haaate having to check if things exist, when so many other details fail politely and impact nothing. At least now it's one extra character instead of try-catch rigmarole.

Nullish coalescing makes a lot of stuff much easier to read and write.

If this was cpp, clang-tidy would tell you “do not use else after return”

I don’t know how null works in swift, but assuming it coerces to bool I’d write

if (a) return a;
return b;

Python, checking in ...

return (a or b)

Parentheses aren't necessary, I just prefer them for readability.

See python documentation on boolean operators for reference. Short story is a or b is an expression that evaluates to a if a is "truthy" else b. "Falsy" is empty strings/containers, 0 and None.

Please don't use #2. It is how you get the goto fail bug

return a and a or b → return a or b

correction from @murtaza64

Yea uh is this actually equivalent? In all of those other cases you're checking if a is null and in the last case my understanding is it is checking to see if a is falsely. In the case that a is 0, or undefined, or an empty array or any other kind of non null falsey value, then the behavior would be different.

I work with python so here's python

return a or b

What if both are null

we can remove the return!

const fn = (a, b) => a || b

fromMaybe a b

I hate this so much. Literally stopped using Perl and switched to PHP to get away from the "Look, ma! I can condense 6 comprehensible lines to one complete gibberish line that still works!" crowd.

I'm not saying I won't use shorthand if/else format on very rare occasions where you have to do a bunch of different if else's within your HTML for some reason, but in general, I try to avoid it.

I hate it.

It's like:

The tree is green, if it's summer. If it's summer, the tree is green.

I like the second much better.

Except there's literally no change in performance as a normal compiler will treat those the same. It just looks nice and trim down the time an experienced dev reads and understands the code by around 200ms.