this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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Alright, spicy opinion time: I think, the
!operator is dumb.It's yet another symbol with a meaning, which people have to learn.
And it's easy to overlook, especially in languages with parentheses in their if-conditions:
I think that just a
.not()method on Booleans is cooler:You can do this in Rust, which is where I have that idea from: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2021&gist=dedb71bd84243c78ee0afad0f30b80c3
Would you say that it reads better as "not x" or "x not" (if we remove all special characters)?
I mean, that is more obvious and more readable.
But what I really don't like about it, is that it's less clear to what it applies. For example:
Is that
not (a and b)or(not a) and b?Obviously, you can define precedence rules, like there also is for
!, but that's again just additional things to learn.I'm definitely not generally opposed to special characters. I do also hate significant whitespace, because I find that less readable than braces.