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Comment by eloisius | Hacker News Reader

I'm a recovering rubyist (actually I still love ruby, just never get to write it anymore). The only times I felt `unless` was truly more readable than `if !something` was when it was used in the conditional suffix form like

    do_something unless already_done?

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This is the poster child use case for "unless", IMHO.

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.

do_something if not already_done?

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.

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