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Comment by JellyBeanThief | Hacker News Reader

I was thinking exactly the same. You can write

    if (cond) { cons }

on one line and get more readable code admittedly a few chars longer.

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Don't even need the curly braces. I do

    if (cond) doSomething();

all the time.

if (heathen) dontUseCurlies();

    if (dontUseCurlies):
      goto fail
      goto fail

go to jail

Code patterns are social! What is strange to one is normal to another.

The kind of pattern used here with the `||` might seem weird to some JavaScript developers, but it's pretty normal in shell scripts, and it's pretty normal in Ruby with `unless`!

`||` is conventional in bash, but definitely not in JS. `x || value` is closer to conventional JS, but using it for control flow is certainly not common and a stylistic choice, for sure.

>The kind of pattern used here with the `||` might seem weird to some JavaScript developers, but it's pretty normal in shell scripts

Shell scripts are NOT known for being easy to read. They're full of obscure and sometimes frankly bizarre, arcane syntax that newcomers would have no idea about. Quick, what does "$#" mean? An experienced bash programmer would know, but no one else would. Shell scripts were never meant to be easy to read; they're just an extension of the shell syntax, and of course vary a lot from shell to shell (e.g. bash vs zsh vs ksh etc.).

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