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From: Julio Di Egidio <julio@diegidio.name>
Newsgroups: comp.programming
Subject: =?UTF-8?Q?Re=3A_=E2=80=9CBooleans_Considered_Harmful=E2=80=9D?=
Date: Thu, 22 May 2025 14:43:08 +0200
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On 22/05/2025 13:51, David Brown wrote:
> On 22/05/2025 08:51, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>> I think most of this article is a load of nonsense, myself.
>>
>> <https://www.infoworld.com/article/3990923/booleans-considered-harmful.html>
>>
>> Thoughts?
> 
> He makes some relevant points about clarity of code,

He makes no relevant points: the whole thing is rather misguided.

<snip>
> So in general, I'd prefer positive names to negative ones - 
> "UserIsAuthorised" rather than "UserIsNotAuthorised".  And I would not 
> "hide" a "not" in the middle of a variable name as his example does. But 
> sometimes a negative name makes more sense - "UserBanned" might be 
> perfectly reasonable.
> 
> All things being equal, I'd usually choose "put positive first".  But 
> again, that's more a bias than a rule.  In particular, it might often be 
> best with an "early exit" coming first regardless of whether it is the 
> positive condition or the negative condition.

I could give tons of *sensible* examples where you'd have to say
"sure, maybe, in that case".  Rather, some properties and conditions
are *most naturally* expressed negatively.  Keep also in mind that
readability is way more about uniformity than the specifics, hence
some of those are/were indeed common conventions then patterns. --
More on that line in my initial post.

That said, "think positive", as the "think negative" of some of
your counter-examples, is only *dumb and dumbing*: perfectly in
line with the abolishment of negation and the dumbing down of
humanity, as negation is the fundamental logical connective...

Not that I expect *you* and the resident gang to acknowledge
any of that, of course: you cannot even engage properly.

Anyway, HTH.

-Julio