It's been a while since I've touched Ruby, but I think the stance was that only false and nil should be falsey? Which is not an unreasonable stance to take. The fewer falsey values, the easier it is to predict the behaviour. It's just surprising when coming from other languages.
Just off the top of my head, PHP treats "0", that is, specifically a string with a single zero, as falsey. Which has clearly gone too far to the other extreme.
I like how e.g. C# screams at you for this. It's annoying at first, but then you go "Well, yeah, I should've explicitly written what I wanted to check".
C#, and Java (where C# got it from, probably), Go and Pascal, Rust and Haskell (I mean, with those two's type systems, imagine they didn't forbid it.. lol), it's not even uncommon.
It's not that you couldn't convert between types, it's that it wouldn't be automatic. You would need to actively call toboolean on a value before using it as a boolean, and the idea behind that is that intentionally casting the value leads to fewer mistakes
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u/deceze 23h ago
It's been a while since I've touched Ruby, but I think the stance was that only
falseandnilshould be falsey? Which is not an unreasonable stance to take. The fewer falsey values, the easier it is to predict the behaviour. It's just surprising when coming from other languages.Just off the top of my head, PHP treats
"0", that is, specifically a string with a single zero, as falsey. Which has clearly gone too far to the other extreme.