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Stop Naming Your Variables "Flag": The Art of Boolean Prefixes (2025)

11 points by mooreds

by jessyco

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This is something I've gone through and started to think about and eventually try and help others with. Working with mulitlingual people I noticed a tendency to use negative words "disabled" instead of "enabled" which always made code have !disabled everywhere. Tried the enum approach as well; Love focused writings like this to distill a lot of information into an easy to read form. the new concept for me is the `with` as in to apply functionality by extending a `with` class (this is inside an angular project). Also using types for values so when passing a value in for methods you don't get a blank true/false you get a human readable thing which is useful for debugging and building. Only care about optimizations later if it will ever matter.

by JSR_FDED

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You start with a Boolean to represent two possible values/states. Then your program evolves and you need represent a third state, so what do you do? Obviously you add an other Boolean.
I keep doing that and then for several weeks I deal with the extra pain and complexity this causes. Then always, and I mean always, I end up rewriting all that code using enums.

by krapp

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This, but using bitfields and enums.
Using multiple booleans like this seems like such a waste unless you're using a language that doesn't let you do otherwise.

by JSR_FDED

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