[m-chrzan]

I don't want to come of as insensitive, it sounds like you've had some really bad experiences with ternaries in the past and it's important to acknowledge your experience. But I just want to say that not all ternaries are like that.

In a more serious tone, ternaries in places where they should be used, i.e. as expressions, are in my opinion much clearer to read than replacing them with an if-else statement. In my mind, an if/else block is an imperative entity that describes two different actions that could happen. Even if in reality both branches are trivial, my mind will be unnecessarily occupied with the fact that it needs to reason about code here, not just data. A ternary, on the other hand, is a declarative entity, saying that this expression takes on this or that value, usually in such a way that each branch of it maintains some invariant with respect to what's in the conditional.

[nicoburns]

> In my mind, an if/else block is an imperative entity that describes two different actions that could happen. Even if in reality both branches are trivial, my mind will be unnecessarily occupied with the fact that it needs to reason about code here, not just data

That's true in some languages. But in some languages if-else can also be used as in expression. e.g. in Rust I can write:

    let foo = if condition { "FOO" } else { "BAR" }

[gpderetta]

... which is equivalent to a ternary, hence the thesis.