Interesting! I wouldn't want to argue against your experience.
I do wonder if it's an issue of "unless" being misused? Programmers using it just for fun rather than considering whether it's the best choice in context?
I do wonder if it's an issue of "unless" being misused? Programmers using it just for fun rather than considering whether it's the best choice in context?
When I come across an `unless`, I can't use them; I have to come back out into "conscious reading" mode, or something like that. Makes me crazy.
do_something unless already_done?Anything else (at least for me) is more difficult to read, it's probably due to being exposed to all thos other languages that do not have that syntactic construct. Using C syntax conditionals feels more natural to me, but again this is all opinionated.
Problem with so much syntactic sugar is you need to retain/recall the semantics of the vocabulary. As a polyglot programmer who doesn't write much code anymore, it slows me down.
That said, I feel it's really down to double+ negation being hard to handle. `if` with a single negation is fine; `unless` is automatically a negation, so you're just off to a bad start on that front. I feel like the only viable use is in a case like Rust's `let … else { diverge }` where anything that fails the condition is guaranteed to diverge (typically, return) and I can just ignore it when reading the overall codeflow. But Ruby mixes that up and does `diverge unless …` which puts the diverging part "up front" and "in the way" for such readings.
Weirdly, Ruby was one of the first languages I learned early in my career, and at the time I had no problem with `unless`. But after years of experience with other languages, I similarly feel that `if` statements now trigger the fast pattern matching circuits in my brain, while `unless` makes me do a double-take and basically translate it into `if not`
At first I thought I was just becoming dumber with age, but I like your explanation better :P
When I write Elixir, `unless` gets awkward in a functional style of programming, and Elixir has guard clauses and pattern matching. I pretty much never use `unless` in Elixir despite using it in Ruby for years.
Sometimes, I'll add extra methods with a negation in the name itself. So for example
# instead of
return "invalid" unless valid?
return [] if empty?
# I define invalid?() and do
return "invalid" if invalid?
return [] if empty?THING if logical condition
Filter First is far better self-documentation: if condition THING
When I started writing these as pipeline execution. Then I’ll use a maybe?() instead if the conditional does not need to depend on the result of a previous operation.
For example, I can totally see how imperative-first would mess up people with neurodivergant brains.
Tangent -- Ruby takes a lot of inspiration from Perl.