from a cartesian perspective it's weird that "false" and "true" are the canonical programming boolean rather than "yes" and "no". we're using a concept as nebulous as truth to make execution decisions? i cannot prove that a blade of grass is real and you expect me to be the arbiter of whether "isDarkMode" is the truth? what's to stop me from becoming a god
news writer at PC Gamer. older stuff at Polygon, Fanbyte, Waypoint, etc. artist formerly known as an imaginary baseball team. horse conspiracist.
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in reply to @Webster's post:
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in javascript all values other than false, null, undefined, 0, and "" are treated as "truthy" in conditional statements, but only true is true in a strict comparison.
fun, only vaguely relevant fact: the Japanese language doesn't have "yes" or "no" in the same way that English and most other Indo-European languages have. instead, "hai" and "iie" are more like "correct" and "incorrect". sometimes a japanese work will (correctly) translate "hai" as "no" in a specific context and weebs who do not know this particular aspect of the language will yell about it being wrong.
Chinese doesn’t really have yes or no either; is/isn’t and agree/don’t agree cover many situations.
Swedish has “ja” which means yes, but also “jo” which kinda means “well actually yes” – it’s used to contradict negative statements or assumptions. “It’s not raining, is it?” “Jo.”
the boring answer is that programming came out of mathematical logic where false and true is kind of referring to nebulous truth
also, they are slightly easier to spell and shorter to write. over the course of computer science history the savings to time and storage would have been incalculable.
Technically speaking, they should be on/off, since at the deepest level, that's what they like...y'know, are, haha. But that'd prolly be confusing since you couldn't do t/f or y/n.
i was just telling someone yesterday that truth and reality are different categories…
