this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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Alright, spicy opinion time: I think, the
!operator is dumb.It's yet another symbol with a meaning, which people have to learn.
And it's easy to overlook, especially in languages with parentheses in their if-conditions:
I think that just a
.not()method on Booleans is cooler:You can do this in Rust, which is where I have that idea from: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2021&gist=dedb71bd84243c78ee0afad0f30b80c3
We use ! because keyboards no longer have buttons for ¬, which is the other logical not.
We could have used the tilde, which has been used in formal logic & maths for negation in very many contexts for a long time.
It's used instead in C and many C-like languages for the far less useful bitwise negation. Of course, we could have had it work in the same way as bitwise vs logical and & or, by dialling up the symbol. Which would have massively improved its visibility compared to the bang.
But for some reason, no. They chose the bang instead.