[jonahx]

This would be a reasonable position:

"While the ternary is often clearer, we chose to sacrifice expressiveness and brevity for the sake of preventing abuses, which we found were all too common."

But that is not the claim being made in the FAQ.

> Thus all if and for statements also require {} brackets.

Indeed this rule seems to spring from the same philosophy. It is most certainly not a preference for clarity, though. It is a preference for consistency.

The philosophy is: "We're giving up expressiveness and brevity because in our experience most people can't be trusted to not shoot themselves in the foot."

This choice would be much more palatable if they were honest about it. But instead, they take the road of insisting that the verbose consistency is actually clearer, which it isn't, at least in many people's opinions.

[Merovius]

> It is most certainly not a preference for clarity, though. It is a preference for consistency.

FTR, with "most certainly" you're committing the same fault your accusing the Go team here. You might not think it matters for clarity. I, at least, disagree.

> in our experience most people can't be trusted to not shoot themselves in the foot.

I don't understand the difference between this suggested phrasing and talking about clarity. I'd argue you tend to shoot yourself in the foot if and only if you aren't clear about what you're doing. Clarity and lack of footguns seem directly correlated.

[jonahx]

> FTR, with "most certainly" you're committing the same fault your accusing the Go team here.

Fair enough. It's too late to edit.

> I don't understand the difference between this suggested phrasing and talking about clarity. I'd argue you tend to shoot yourself in the foot if and only if you aren't clear about what you're doing.

This is partially true but it's not that simple imo.

In my OP, the ternary version is clearer. But if you allow it, then you also open the door to nested ternaries, and foot shooting.

Allowing single line if statements (as, eg, ruby does) also allows for clearer code, at the expense of consistency.

[Merovius]

> Allowing single line if statements (as, eg, ruby does) also allows for clearer code, at the expense of consistency.

This (or rather allowing conditionals without braces) was what I was referring to. They are a foot-gun, because of the lack of clarity. It's a common source of bugs in C/C++ code that a developer thought they'd add a line of code to a conditional block or loop but didn't, because of a lack of braces. Requiring braces unconditionally make it always unambiguous and obvious what block a given statement belongs to.

Obviously YMMV - this is, as most discussions in programming, a matter of opinion. Which was my point :)

[jonahx]

I'm aware of the reasoning. As you say, in C people would carelessly edit:

    if (condition)
      doSomething

to

    if (condition)
      doSomething
      doSomething2

So fair enough, you protect against that. You cannot therefore conclude that:

    if (condition) {
      doSomething
    }

is clearer or that 1 line if statements aren't clear. First of all, you've purchased your insurance at the cost of brevity. Which is quite a high price, especially when you have to use them constantly to write:

    if err != nil {
      return err
    }

and when it forces all of your 1 line conditional expressions to be 4 - 6 lines, per my OP.

And there are solutions that allow you to buy your insurance without such a high price. You can invert the position of the if, as ruby does. You could make a rule that when you don't have braces you have to write your statement on the same line. The point is this isn't the only way out. And clarity is not the same as preventing one specific kind of error, which occurs only in a context which could be changed as well.

[rufio]

on that note: here's an example of a very costly example of this exact mistake, Apple's famous "GoTo Fail" for anyone that isn't aware of it: https://dwheeler.com/essays/apple-goto-fail.html