It's been awhile since I absorbed the weird programming norm that "real programmers use the !x form!" but even after 10+ years of !x , I still find ==false more readable.
I agree. To me, its simpler to understand. Suppose x is a bool, reading the code, I say to myself "if not true..." or "if not false..." and my ape brain gets confused on what happens if its not true or not false.
Reading "if true == false" or "if false == false", it becomes much clearer what we're testing here and I understand it instantly.
If the statement is "if (!isGreen)", it's much clearer to say "if is not green" than it is to say "if is green is false". Putting == true or == false makes you convert a clear statement "is green" into "true" or "false" instead of just being a natural English statement. It would be like saying in conversation, "I want to go to the store is false" instead of "I don't want to go to the store".
> If the statement is "if (!isGreen)", it's much clearer to say "if is not green" than it is to say "if is green is false"
I agree that when you read it, it's clearer. And yet I still prefer "if(isGreen == false)" for reasons of clarity in another sense.
The "!" being right next to the "(" makes it easier to miss the "!" when scanning quickly through the code, hence reading the logic the wrong way round and seeing "(isGreen" instead of "(!isGreen". And that's enough of a risk to ignore the readability advantage of "(!".
(Edit: To be clear, I don't suggest "== true" for the opposite cases, as the lack of a "!" in those means the risk is gone)
It also helps readability if the ! is before a function name that doesn't follow the right naming convention for it. One of my pet peeves in C is "if (!strcmp(a, b))". "!strcmp" I read as "not string compare" and I would expect it to mean that the strings don't compare when it means the exact opposite. This is true of anything following the "0 means success, anything else is an error condition" error handling scheme. So I use "if (strcmp(a, b) == 0)" instead because the "==" makes look at what value it's being compared to specifically and I make fewer assumptions.
My whole career has been C++ and shader languages, so this really hasn't come up for me. I imagine it being a real word would improve readability greatly.
Reading "if true == false" or "if false == false", it becomes much clearer what we're testing here and I understand it instantly.