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Comment by jneen | Hacker News Reader

I can't speak for Brendan, but I generally think && / || are great for assignment, but otherwise it's code-smell.

    var foo = obj && obj.bar; // great
    !isActive && $parent.toggleClass('open'); // smelly
    if (!isActive) $parent.toggleClass('open'); // better

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  if (!isActive) {
      $parent.toggleClass('open');
  } // best

Damian Conway of Perl fame wrote an excellent style guide for C in the early/mid 90s which I'm pretty sure explained why (I can't find my copy):

Programmer A:

  if (!isActive) $parent.toggleClass('open');

Programmer B:

  if (!isActive) 
      $parent.toggleClass('open');
      doSomethingElse();

Oh dear.

Yep, that's why I always demand that if you're not going to use curlies, you make it a one-liner.

    // okay
    if (!isActive) $parent.toggleClass('open');

    // not okay
    if (!isActive)
      $parent.toggleClass('open');

That way you know when you change it to two lines, you have to add curlies.

I believe HTML5 boilerplate implements the smelly pattern.

https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/blob/master/index....

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