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Comment by keymone | Hacker News Reader

    a = flag ? b : c

is much more readable and concise than

    if flag {
      a = b
    } else {
      a = c
    }

battling habits by making useful code inconvenient is just sad

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It's more concise, but certainly not more readable. You lose a few seconds writing it the second way. It's fine.

To me the ternary operator is more readable. It has way less extraneous symbols, it is expression-oriented and lets you focus on what's really happening: that something gets assigned to a based on some condition. It expresses intent better than the if-else.

Sure it can be abused and nested beyond human comprehension... just like if-else! So that's a non-argument.

This is the typical operator vs programmer argument. If you're working with difficult concepts compactness trumps simplicity. Plus Go makes it such an enormous chore to write programs with a lot of features.

If you're the one trying to figure out what went wrong in production, both properties are big plusses. Simplicity means scanning code quickly will yield an answer. And the fact that Go makes writing code a chore means there usually isn't that much code.

And of course the fact that Go is so young, means there aren't that many libraries that behave differently. People actually use the standard library features, unlike in Java/C#/C++/Python/... It's becoming less true for net/http, less true for log (all companies I know have their own version, I wonder if Google has it's own version internally too). Go's still in it's honeymoon stage where the standard libraries can actually be used for real projects because they're so young they could implement modern web features without having legacy cruft, nor have they made wrong choices yet, like supporting a dead-end standard or practice.

i don't get what is not simple about ternary operator?

why is if statement that necessitates multiple assignment statements, involves scoping rules and is objectively bloated for trivial cases, why is it considered simpler?

it sure is easier to get than an operator due to proximity to natural language, but why tend to people that can't grasp that a statement can be represented as an expression?

As a general principle, everything else being equal, less information density is simpler. Ternary operator is quite dense.

Think about it: algebra (most of it) is just simple concepts incredibly densely written down and recursively applied. There are very few really complex parts in it, by which I mean there's very few individual steps that take long to understand, there's just so bloody many of them and they link together so incredibly tightly.

But everything else is not equal; the if-else construct is less clear, more error prone, and you must read it fully to make sure all branches are assignments and that it's therefore logically equivalent to an assignment.

why are you so certain? is it maybe because you've programmed your whole life using ifs and they look more natural to you?

But even the else keyword itself is reserved for special occasions in Go. The thing about the language is that if something seems awkward (which I agree your example is), you have to ask if you are expressing it that way only because that is what you would do in other languages, or if there is a Go way to express it? More often than not, there is a better way to express it.

The code you gave serves no purpose, so it is difficult to see how it fits into the larger context of a real application, but it may be possible that you don't need an if/else statement like this at all.

If `c` is not some complex expression, I would write that as:

    a := c
    if flag {
    	a = b
    }

and if `flag` is always false i would write it as

    a := c

and be done with it

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