I mean aside of the variable name, this is not entirely unreasonable.
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
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I would certainly rather see this than {isAdmin: bool; isLoggedIn: bool}. With boolean | null, at least illegal states are unrepresentable... even if the legal states are represented in an... interesting way.
E: omg forget my whole comment. I agree with you that the name sucks.
I mostly don't like that role is typically an intuitive name, and now suddenly it means something I wouldn't expect. Why add confusion to your code? I don't always remember what I meant week to week, much less if someone else wrote it.
If I had a nickel for every time that happened to me, I’d still be poor, but at least I’d have several nickels. 😁
Product manager: "I want a new role for users that can only do x,y,z"
Developer: "uh.. yeah. About that... Give me a few days."
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?
Ah, the ol' tristate boolean switcheroo
i would say why would you just not to isAdmin = true but i also worked with someone who did just this so i'll instead just sigh.
also the real crime is the use of javascript tbh
That's TypeScript. I can tell by the pixels defining a type above.
Was looking at it and could not figure out why their weren't any semicolon's.
Neither Javascript nor Typescript require semicolon, it is entirely a stylistic choice except in very rare circumstances that do not come up in normal code.
Explanation for nerds
The reason is the JS compiler removes whitespace and introduces semicolons only "where necessary".
So writing
function myFn() {
return true;
}
Is not the same as
function myFn() {
return
true;
}
Because the compiler will see that and make it:
function myFn() { return; true; }
You big ol' nerd. Tee-hee.
Common JavaScript L
That's good to know. Don't know how I didn't know this. Been writing JS since 2000. Always just used them I guess. Ecmascripts look funny to me without them
Same here. My brain interprets them as one long run-on sentence and throws a parsing error.
This is pretty clearly just rage bait. Nothing is actually setting the value so it's undef. Moreover there isn't any context here to suggest if the state definitions are determined by some weird api or are actually just made up
Troof
I mean facts. Facts is what the kids say. Facts.
*Fax
We don't use fax machines any more grandad! It's all twoggles now! Twoggle me a nurp!
What if role is FILE_NOT_FOUND?!
if it's 'FILE_NOT_FOUND' then the string will be read as truthy and you will get 'User is admin' logged.
Ackshually three equal signs check for type as well. So mere truthiness is not enough. It has to be exactly true.
Also, everyone knows FILE_NOT_FOUND isn't a string but a boolean value.
Sadly this is (or used to be) valid in PHP and it made for some debugging “fun”.
There are several small details that PHP won't allow, but It's valid Javascript and it's the kind of thing you may find on that language.
What the fuck
role is never instantiated, so the... privileged....logs.... will never be called
Edit: Actually no logs at all, I read the null as undefined on first skim
I see this every sprint.