Comment by ryandv

Comment by ryandv 9 hours ago

11 replies

Set theory...

There are self-identifying "senior software engineers" that cannot understand what even an XOR is, even after you draw out the entire truth table, all four rows.

BuyMyBitcoins 9 hours ago

I am surprised at common it is for software engineers to not treat booleans properly. I can’t tell you how many times if seen ‘if(IsFoo(X) != false)’

It never used to bug me as a junior dev, but once a peer pointed this out it became impossible for me to ignore.

  • furyofantares 6 hours ago

    The most egregious one I saw, I was tracking down a bug and found code like this:

        bool x;
    
        ...
    
        if (x == true) {
            DoThing1();
        } else if (x == false) {
            DoThing2();
        }
    
    And of course neither branch was hit, because this is C, and the uninitialized x was neither 0 nor 1, but some other random value.
    • tomjakubowski 5 hours ago

      Sometimes this kind of thing happens after a few revisions of code, where in earlier versions the structure of the code made more sense: maybe several conditions which were tested and then, due to changing requirements, they coalesced into something which now reads as nonsense.

      When making a code change which touches a lot of places, it's not always obvious to "zoom out" and read the surrounding context to see if the structure of the code can be updated. The developer may be chewing through a grep list of a few dozen locations that need to be changed.

  • munchlax 7 hours ago

    People do that? This hurts my brain. if(IsFoo(X)) is clear and readable.

hyperman1 8 hours ago

I've spent a lot of time not seeing how xor is just the 'not equals' operator for booleans.

layer8 8 hours ago

Or, for a boolean type, that XOR is the same as the inequality operator.