Will Anderson

A week or two ago, I got this feedback on a code review:

You’re using foo ? foo : "" here. It would be shorter and more obvious if you wrote it as foo || ""

This was valid feedback, and I updated the code.

After I’d checked in my changes, I got the following IM from a senior member of my team:

I see you did foo || ""? What does the || mean?

:)

This was a good reminder of two things:

• “Obvious code” is a subjective concept
• No matter how experienced you are with something, you’ll still find blind spots from time to time

P.S. If that syntax is also new to you, it’s taking advantage of how JavaScript does “or”. A JavaScript or returns the first truthy value, or the last value if none are truthy:

e.g. (false || 0) === 0 and (0 || false) === false and (foo || "") === "" (assuming foo is “falsey”)

Many JavaScript developers use this behavior as a shortcut for setting default values, because null and undefined are falsey.