Yoda Conditionals: Why you should use them

A related pattern in Java is that if you write

   x.equals(“five”)

you can get a null pointer exception if x is null, but

   “five”.equals(x)

returns false if x is null which is probably what you want because it is not equal to “five”; it is a good thing though to

   import static java.util.Objects.equals

And then write

   equals(x,y)

And never get a null pointer exception. Other languages have other problems that make Yoda conditionals more appealing. In PHP the compiler won’t stop you from writing

   if(x=y) …

where = is the assignment operator instead of the equality test, but if x is a literal the compiler will balk.

When I wrote a lot of C I used Yoda Conditionals because the compiler catches some typos. I'm skeptical of increased readability of them.