Representative Line: Tern This Statement Around and Go Home

When looking for representative lines, ternaries are almost easy mode. While there's nothing wrong with a good ternary expression, they have a bad reputation because they can quickly drift out towards "utterly unreadable".

Or, sometimes, they can drift towards "incredibly stupid". This anonymous submission is a pretty brazen example of the latter:

return (accounts == 1 ? 1 : accounts)

Presumably, once upon a time, this was a different expression. The code changed. Nobody thought about what was changing or why. They just changed it and moved on. Or, maybe, they did think about it, and thought, "someday this might go back to being complicated again, so I'll leave the ternary in place", which is arguably a worse approach.

We'll never know which it was.

Since that was so simple, let's look at something a little uglier, as a bonus. "WDPS" sends along a second ternary violation, this one has the added bonus of being in Objective-C. This code was written by a contractor (whitespace added to keep the article readable- original is all on one line):

 NSMutableArray *buttonItems = [NSMutableArray array]; buttonItems = !negSpacer && !self.buttonCog ? @[] : (!negSpacer && self.buttonCog ? @[self.buttonCog] : (!self.buttonCog && negSpacer ? @[negSpacer] : @[negSpacer,self.buttonCog]));

This is a perfect example of a ternary which simply got out of control while someone tried to play code golf. Either this block adds no items to buttonItems, or it adds a buttonCog or it adds a negSpacer, or it adds both. Which means it could more simply be written as:

 NSMutableArray *buttonItems = [NSMutableArray array]; if (negSpacer) { [buttonItems addObject:negSpacer]; } if (self.buttonCog) { [buttonItems addObject:self.buttonCog]; }

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