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Comment by biot | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that this is one of the most hated (http://hatepaste.com/paste/f5da3584):

  if (someBoolean == true) {
      doSomething();
  }

I got into the habit of doing this since it's immediately obvious that the value you're comparing is expected to be a boolean and not something like an integer, which could cause subtle bugs later on if what you thought was a boolean gets negated. More commonly, it's of the form:

  if (someValue == false) ...

rather than:

  if (!someValue) ...

to distinguish this from:

  if (someValue == 0) ...

It only takes an extra fraction of a second of typing and increases clarity for the next developer, or for you six months later. Anyone else do this too?

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Its far easier to read if (!someBoolean) than if (someBoolean == false)

Ofcourse, your example probably applies to JavaScript since anything and everything can be a boolean, or not depending on the phase of the moon. In Java at least if not someBoolean is nice to read, and if (isGood) is nicer than if (isGood == true).

I think this is a pretty subjective topic - you can't say that one way is easier to read than any other way (for anyone except yourself).

Some people prefer verbosity over brevity, just like some people prefer K&R braces to Allman, or CamelCase to underscoring.

If you're going to do that, at least go the whole hog and avoid assignment/comparison bugs:

  if (true == someBoolean) {
    // code
  }

Just as long as you don't do this:

    if (someBoolean){
        return true;
    } else {
        return false;
    }

Not usually. However, I do sometimes make explicit comparisons to False or None if I can end up with both, and the behaviour differs depending on what I have.

It's probably not the best idea to be doing that, but it's not tripped me up yet ;-)

In Java, it's a compile error to pass something not of type `bool' into that expression, so things like

  if (someBoolean)

Are unambiguous.

True. I suppose this is more of a holdover from my C programming days.

Wow. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

Are you suggesting I should use Lisp, or that I haven't beat the average, or...?

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