[sdegutis]

The article says:

    // This was useful in C to avoid accidentally
    // typing variable = null. These days it will
    // confuse most people, with little benefit.

The use of "was" and "these days" in the link shows that the author of this piece is in a tiny little bubble of development, and is far from being able to give general advice for programming. C is not past-tense. C, C++, Objective-C, these are all still widely used today by modern professionals. I'm very tired of articles and authors which claim to be representative of all programming or programmers, when they're isolated to a tiny little bubble. Especially when they only know JavaScript.

[haswell]

He follows this up with:

> Don’t code “your way”. Just follow the coding standards. This stuff is already figured out. Make your code predictable and easy to read by coding the way people expect.

I'm not a C dev, but is "(null != thing)" still a convention? (Based on your comment it sounds like yes). If yes, it seems to me like he's saying: keep doing that!

Nowhere does he claim that his advice about this convention applies to every language (this would be silly) and not writing C should not preclude someone from giving programming advice.

The "generally applicable" advice that he does give is exactly that: general. Is it possible to write a blog post about code quality/complexity/insert-thing-here that applies to all circumstances? I don't believe it is. It doesn't mean that there is no value to be gained from exploring concepts that may apply.

[MaulingMonkey]

> I'm not a C dev, but is "(null != thing)" still a convention?

Configuring the warning your compiler gives for 'if (x=y)' to generate an error instead is a vastly better convention that completely supersedes Yoda style, IMO. 'if ((x=y))' remains available for those who really want to assign in conditionals.

[Ace17]

> I'm not a C dev, but is "(null != thing)" still a convention? (Based on your comment it sounds like yes)

I'd rather call it a trend than a convention.