My take on the discussion to introduce an ? operator in Go 👈 No. For so many reasons.

@prologic@twtxt.net I don’t like it either. Too much magic, that only works in certain cases.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org one time i saw that operator when working with ruby on rails and i was so confused by it that i got stuck on the same code involving it for 9 hours straight

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz You mean the ? as suffix for boolean returning functions or as ternary operator (condition ? true_value : false_value)?

Interestingly, I just had to look up the first case. I was under the wrong impression that the question mark at the end would be some shortcut for chained function or method calls that handles nil return values in a graceful way without actually dereferencing and thus crashing. I probably never wrote more than 30 lines of Ruby in my entire life. Must have been some other language.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ita a terrible operator that makes code hard
Yo read as @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz difhtidu points out 😆

@prologic@twtxt.net Which one? I don’t mind the ternary operator at all. In fact, I often find myself missing it in Go. I don’t find the two alternatives particularly elegant:

foo := "eggs"
if bar {
    foo = "spam"
}

Or:

var foo string
if bar {
    foo = "spam"
} else {
    foo = "eggs"
}

To my eye, this just would look a lot nicer:

foo := bar ? "spam" : "eggs"

Or at least as the Pythons do it:

foo = "spam" if bar else "eggs"

The ternary operator especially shines with relatively short expressions.