And no one on his team ever understood his code.
Sometimes being declarative is better than being “smart”
The last panel is infinitely more readable than parsing the whole chunk of logic above. Maybe you’re just not used to this language’s (I think this meme used C#) null operators.
Yeah, I have very little programming experience, and even not knowing the code, I figured this one out. Super simplified and clear.
I’m confused on how this is difficult to understand. Put aside the fact that it’s just a regular operator that… I mean virtually everyone should know, how hard is it to google “what does ?? mean in [language]” which has the added benefit of learning a new operator that can clean up your code?
Well yeah but imagine you had to do that on most lines of the code? It would become very distracting imho. If you are in a team with people that have a lot experience and or will learn more anyway this is fine. But if you are in a team with not very good programmers which “will never learn” because they have other stuff to do, you should be careful when using code like this. Though I would prefer in the former of course.
Honestly, and I mean this sincerely, if you’re on a team where the nullable coalesce is going to be confusing after the first handful of times encountered… look for a new job. It doesn’t bode well for their ability to do their jobs.
This is like the guy at Walmart who needs hand holding each time they clean a machine, it’s a problem waiting to happen.
If condition then this else that vs this ?? that
Which option do you think requires less time for a person to identify and understand?
Sure if it’s just your own code do whatever comes natural to you but there’s a reason we don’t use these kind of logical operators in day to day speech is my point.
Ive been a backend dev for 2 years now and I’ve never come across the ?? operator and every time I come across a ternary operator I have to Google in what order comes what.
Not saying it doesn’t make the code more concise and less “noisy” but sometimes a simple if else statement just makes the code easier to mantain
This is why I usually don’t comment on stuff like this in PRs. If it’s readable and easy to understand it doesn’t need more abstractions. Even if it’s less code. What’s it save like a few bytes? That’s not as useful as the whole team instantly knowing how the code works when they see it lol
I will say though if a jr dev came upon the last code they would just look it up and learn something so that’s a total valid path too. Just depends on your codebase and how your team works. I think it usually ends up being a mix with larger teams.
There’s more to it imho. The first three are more prone to mistakes than the last. You are much less likely to accidentally alter the logic intended in a simple null coalesce than you are in if statements.
That’s fair but if you had proper test coverage there wouldn’t be much risk. Who has that though? Lol
