• 0 Posts
  • 9 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 30th, 2023

help-circle
  • Then you’d need to do something else.

    Precisely my point.

    And I’m not advocating for any of that. That’s just weird design, both of them, and as such a good example of something that warrants a bigger redesign in general.

    Just advocating for clear, sensible, self-documenting and most importantly, expandable and maintainable code.

    What’s idiomatic varies between languages and the conventions aren’t the same even then, when arguing across disciplines. This discussion seems to be more about different educations. I can get your point but from my personal experience in academia and working in the field it sounds undesired. But that’s just it. My, as in extremely limited, perspective. From your pov what you argue here is probably equally correct to what I think from mine is from my pov, it’s just a difference in the segment of the field we work in I suppose. Or plain old cultural differences.

    Whichever it is, I bet we both can find better use for our time. I’m thankful for the time and effort though, even if I wasn’t persuaded. Sorry to have prolonged it so.


  • That is all just external implementation details. Not sure if it was you or someone else, but the main argument in defense of the OP as in it reasonable, was that the name is wrong. That it ought to be idAdmin. None of what you just described should have anything to do with user being or not being an admin. In place of checking “isAdmin” for null, the semantical and resourcewise equivalent would be a third variable for “admin rights having been validated” or whatever. Conflating it in this one variable while renaming it to isAdmin or similar, would be even less sensical… what if somewhere else in the code you have to check whether the initial validations have been made (while the actual role or whether is admin or not is irrelevant), you’d have to check if isAdmin equals null, which in that context would be confusing, ambiguous (i.e someone reading that bit will not know this is what is being checked without additional documentation) and just a code smell in general. You do want to make the important things unambiguous and self-documenting. Even more so the bigger the codebase is and the more contributors there are across its lifetime and in parallel at any given time.

    But if we go with the original meaning of roles overall, then the union type is just a code smell that warrants a proper role thing around it.


  • That all is besides the point. There’s no real advantage to use null instead of defaulting to false there… it’s semantically more accurate and also less wasteful in that other code does not have to worry about nulls which always leads to unnecessary overhead when false is already equivalent in your proposed example.


  • I don’t really follow you there, wouldn’t it be exactly the opposite and wouldn’t checking for nulls be, as a premise, more wasteful? But doesn’t really matter, time to digress. I’m conventionally educated as an engineer so what I know and find reasonable today might be outdated and too strict for most contemporary stuff.


  • Yeah, but if it is about being an admin or not, hence the bool, it’d be idiomatic and reasonable to assume it to be false if we have no data. Unless we want to try and allow admin access based on no data. Having three states for a simple binary state is weird. And if it is not about just being an admin or not, the bool is inherently a too limited choice for representation.


  • Admin is a role though, was my point. And besides, if you check for three different states, and you decide to go with a boolean to represent that, I really find it hard to believe anyone would think it reasonable. It’s valid and it’s practical, but can you really say it’s reasonable?

    I don’t do typescript, but wouldn’t a union of a null and a bool be just more resource intensive than simply using an unsigned byte-sized integer? I struggle to find reasons to ever go for that over something more reasonable and appropriate for what it attempts to represent (3 distinct states as it stands, and likely in future more than just 3 when they have a need for more granularity, as you’d often do with anything you’d need an admin role distinction in the first place), but likely I’m just not familiar with ts conventions. Happy to hear the reasoning for this though.


  • Yeah let’s use a union of a boolean and null to represent role, something that inherently represents more than two (…or three, I guess) different values, as opposed to something like an integer.

    Even if the name is clearly misleading in this specific case, the entire choice of using a bool here is just bad because it’s almost guaranteed you’re going to expand on that in future and then you’ll just have to entirely rewrite the logic because it simply can’t accommodate more than two values (or three with the null union… 🙈), while it gives absolute zero benefits over using something more reasonable like an integer to represent the roles, or in this case, admin, not-admin and guest. Even if you’ll end up with just admin, non-admin and guest, the integer would still work great with no disadvantages in terms of amount of code or whatever. Just increased legibility and semantical accuracy.

    Not to mention that there’s zero reason to combine the state of being logged in and the role in which you’re logged in in one variable… those are two different things. They will remain two different things in future too…

    I mean they’re already chaining elseifs (basically matching/switching, while doing it in an inefficient way to boot 🥴) as though there were an n amount of possible states. Why not just make it make sense from the start instead of whatever the hell this is?


  • A few years of finasteride (+ minoxidil) here; It likely affects people differently, but for me this combo has very effectively ceased my baldening, or at the very least make it very much slower, but I’ve not got any new growth or return of significant amount of growth on areas that already got very thin.

    I’d be realistic about the potential results, maybe a bit skeptical even, just not to get too excited and then disappointed.

    Worth mentioning, too, is that as I understand, this is a lifetime deal. Once you drop them, the process is very likely to continue. Not sure about other corners of the world, but it’s not exactly cheap either.

    It is slow to finally start kicking in properly, and it’s not exactly interesting. As I’ve come to understand, while this combo is actually somewhat proven to actually be provable/consistent clinically, and can result in new growth or regrowth, most don’t get that. I didn’t, anyway, and that’s just my general practitioners words, not a specialists, so take it for what it is, with a grain of salt.

    Edit: I also use ketokonazode shampoo or whatever it’s called infrequently. Not sure if that’s an active part of my own success with stopping the shed and retaining what’s left, so maybe it’s worth mentioning. That and minoxidil I can get without prescription at least around here. Finasterid requires a prescription though.