You can't handle the truth

Quick question. What’s the output of this code in Ruby?

amount = 0
if amount
  puts 'hey'
else
  puts ‘nah'
end

If you answered nah, you’re wrong. But it’s fine because this is one of the biggest gotchas for developers who are new to Ruby. Heck, even seasoned developers like myself sometimes forget this. I blame my college CS professors for putting too much C syntax in my brain.

Ruby has a simple rule for dealing with boolean values: everything is true except false and nil. This also means that every expression and object in Ruby can be evaluated against true or false. For example, you can have a method find that returns an object when it finds one or nil otherwise.

if  o = Customer.find_by(email: ‘stevej@rip.com’)
  puts o.name
else
  puts ‘not found it'
end

But it’s a different story when returning a numeric value because 0 evaluates to true.

false and nil can also be a common source of confusion because you have 2 values that can be false. Consider the default behaviour of Hash, which returns nil if the key does not exist. If you only factor in the nil scenario, you will have a problem when a key returns a false value - a common scenario with code that handles configuration or settings. In the case below, this will output missing key

h = {'a' => 1, 'b' => false}
key = ‘b'
if h[key]
  puts 'found a value'
else
  puts 'missing key'
end

If that’s enough confusion for you, consider this: true, false, and nil are just instances of a class.

irb> true.class
=> TrueClass
irb> false.class
=> FalseClass
irb> nil.class
=> NilClass

They are global variables but you can’t set any value to it which is fine. Otherwise, there will be chaos!

irb> true = 1
SyntaxError: (irb):18: Can't assign to true
true = 1

But, this is Ruby and we can always introduce chaos. Matz, the creator of Ruby, has given us this much power because he trusts that we know what we are doing.

irb> class Bad
irb>   def ==(other)
irb>     true
irb>   end
irb> end

irb> false == Bad.new
=> false
irb> Bad.new == false
=> true

What the heck just happened? Well, == is just another method call - the first is for the FalseClass instance while the second is for the Bad instance.

If you have been using Ruby for a while and wants to become better at it, I suggest you get a copy of Effective Ruby by Peter Jones.

You Can't Handle the Truth