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and people wonder why we say PHP is a meme
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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To be fair: If you are chaining ternary expressions, you deserve to suffer whatever pain the language happens to inflict upon you tenfold.
Why?
It's perfectly readable.
It is sort of readable. A switch is "perfectly" readable for switching.
Ternary expressions aren't switches though
Which is exactly why you shouldn't be using them in a situation that clearly calls for a switch.
In the given example I'd probably use a switch / match expression, but ternaries are usually more flexible than switches and I don't think it's an issue to write a nested ternary instead of if else statements.
Which is bad for readability because the reader need to manually compute it to see whether it's doing simple switching or not. Also it adds the question of "Why did the author use a nested ternary instead of a switch? Was it meant to do more but it got left out unintentionally?"
Yes, you need to read code to understand it. If else statements can also do the job of a switch, so the exact same argument applies.
The point is I don't need to read a switch statement to know that it is a switch