this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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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.
Imo it's context dependent. Obligatory "I'm only a college student/intern" out of the way.
Whenever I'm working with a project with multiple languages (e.g. split frontend+backend, different connected services, etc.) operators like that can get blurry when they aren't consistent between lancuages. Especially when one of those languages doesn't have runtime type enforcement or has weird boolean behavior (looking at you JS/TS) which can lead to unintended behavior
If everyone on the project is only working with that language, then your point is probably pretty close to the mark.
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
It’s easier to mess up
return a != null ? a : bthan it isreturn a ?? b, and operators work from left to right.