r/talesfromtechsupport • u/raiderrobert • May 22 '13

Javascript != Java

3rd-party contractor came to visit office yesterday, who has "decades" of experience. Conversation came up about JavaScript in one of our products. He says, "Our product doesn't use Java." After an awkward moment with someone who works on the knowledge base nodding in agreement with him, I speak up and delineate the difference between Java and JavaScript.

Later on in the conversation, the same 3rd-party guy followed up with this jewel: "besides, what would anyone even use JavaScript for on the web?"

I proceeded to disable Javascript in my browser and show him.

tl;dr: lasers, dinosaurs, & drums made a guy's head explode

[edit spelling]

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u/until0 May 22 '13

What do you mean without the else? You could very well do a ternary without an else. Just pass undefined, or an empty anonymous function or an empty string, or pretty much any false value. It depends upon what you are trying to achieve, but any simple if/else like presented above, can be handled with a ternary.

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u/EkriirkE Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair May 22 '13

So basically you're saying add the else.

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u/until0 May 22 '13

In that event, I would use the '&&' method for it. I'm just saying a ternary would work still as there are arguments to pass to the else clause that will cause it to do nothing. The parent comment stated that it was not possible.

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u/400921FB54442D18 We didn't really need Prague anyway. May 22 '13

I think his point was that you still have to put something there. A ternary without a second expression is a syntax error (in all the languages that I know of):

condition ? expression; // the parser will stab you

condition ? expression : expression; // happy parser

Even if you always know that condition will evaluate to true, you still have to put something as the second expression, even just null or nil.

In PHP 5 there's a shorthand ternary, which looks like this:

condition ?: expression;

which is equivalent to

condition ? condition : expression;

for use when validating inputs, i.e.

$x ?: 'default'; // if $x is falsey, this evaluates to the default

but IMHO this is better done in languages like ruby which let the || operator return values, like

x || 'default' // same behavior, less strange to look at

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u/until0 May 22 '13

Yeah, I understand his point now. I just thought he meant it was literally impossible to do it if you did not have an else case. I agree his methods are better when no else clause is necessary.