I mean aside of the variable name, this is not entirely unreasonable.
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
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I would certainly rather see this than {isAdmin: bool; isLoggedIn: bool}. With boolean | null, at least illegal states are unrepresentable... even if the legal states are represented in an... interesting way.
Admin false LoggedIn false doesn't feel illegal to me, more redundant if anything
I was thinking of the three legal states as:
- not logged in (
nullor{isAdmin: false, isLoggedIn: false}) - logged in as non-admin (
falseor{isAdmin: false, isLoggedIn: true}) - logged in as admin (
trueor{isAdmin: true, isLoggedIn: true})
which leaves {isAdmin: true, isLoggedIn: false} as an invalid, nonsensical state. (How would you know the user's an admin if they're not logged in?) Of course, in a different context, all four states could potentially be distinctly meaningful.
ah you are right! i am so dumb.
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E: omg forget my whole comment. I agree with you that the name sucks.
I mostly don't like that role is typically an intuitive name, and now suddenly it means something I wouldn't expect. Why add confusion to your code? I don't always remember what I meant week to week, much less if someone else wrote it.
If I had a nickel for every time that happened to me, I’d still be poor, but at least I’d have several nickels. 😁
The variable name is 90% why this is so unreasonable. Code is for humans to read, so names matter.
Product manager: "I want a new role for users that can only do x,y,z"
Developer: "uh.. yeah. About that... Give me a few days."
Hmmm I need a datatype with three states... Should I use a named enum? No, no that's too obvious...
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Ah, the ol' tristate boolean switcheroo
tristate as in three states or tristate as in five states?
Is that a quantum boolean?
That is the jankiest thing I have seen in at least ten years.
Edit: because of course it's office.
i would say why would you just not to isAdmin = true but i also worked with someone who did just this so i'll instead just sigh.
also the real crime is the use of javascript tbh
That's TypeScript. I can tell by the pixels defining a type above.
Was looking at it and could not figure out why their weren't any semicolon's.
Neither Javascript nor Typescript require semicolon, it is entirely a stylistic choice except in very rare circumstances that do not come up in normal code.
Explanation for nerds
The reason is the JS compiler removes whitespace and introduces semicolons only "where necessary".
So writing
function myFn() {
return true;
}
Is not the same as
function myFn() {
return
true;
}
Because the compiler will see that and make it:
function myFn() { return; true; }
You big ol' nerd. Tee-hee.
That's terrifying, especially in JS where no type system will fuck you up for returning nothing when you should've returned a boolean.
That's good to know. Don't know how I didn't know this. Been writing JS since 2000. Always just used them I guess. Ecmascripts look funny to me without them
Same here. My brain interprets them as one long run-on sentence and throws a parsing error.
Fair enough, I like it better without but I don't have a strong preference and have no issue adapting to whatever the style of the repo is.
I learned about it researching tools to automatically enforce formatting style and came across StandardJS, which eliminates them by default.
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Hmm, a webdev colleague said he'd normally prefer without semicolons, but used them anyways for better compile errors.
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This is pretty clearly just rage bait. Nothing is actually setting the value so it's undef. Moreover there isn't any context here to suggest if the state definitions are determined by some weird api or are actually just made up
Troof
I mean facts. Facts is what the kids say. Facts.
*Fax
We don't use fax machines any more grandad! It's all twoggles now! Twoggle me a nurp!
Dammit!
Sadly this is (or used to be) valid in PHP and it made for some debugging “fun”.
There are several small details that PHP won't allow, but It's valid Javascript and it's the kind of thing you may find on that language.
I see this every sprint.
What if role is FILE_NOT_FOUND?!
if it's 'FILE_NOT_FOUND' then the string will be read as truthy and you will get 'User is admin' logged.
Ackshually three equal signs check for type as well. So mere truthiness is not enough. It has to be exactly true.
Also, everyone knows FILE_NOT_FOUND isn't a string but a boolean value.
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role is never instantiated, so the... privileged....logs.... will never be called
Edit: Actually no logs at all, I read the null as undefined on first skim
What the fuck
And what if it's undefined?
root access
You could make it even dumber by using weak comparisons.
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