On: Ruby's Creed

[schneidmaster]

Yeah, the safe navigation operator is great, and I really miss it especially when I write JavaScript and have to do something like `foo && foo.bar && foo.bar.baz` instead (...which isn't even the same since it returns `false` if something is null).

[benaiah → schneidmaster]

> which isn't even the same since it returns `false` if something is null

That's not the case AFAIK - checking in both node and FireFox, `true && null` evalutes to `null`, `true && undefined` evaluates to `undefined`, and `true && null && true` again evaluates to `null`. In what scenario does `&&` coerce the returned value to a boolean?

EDIT: checked MDN's docs at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe... - it seems to indicate that there is no such coercion of falsy values to false.

[schneidmaster → benaiah]

Yeah, you're right, I was misremembering the behaviour of `null && null`. At any rate, still clunkier :)

[lobo_tuerto → schneidmaster]

Just use lodash for that.

Your example would become:

  // this won't throw an exception if foo is null
  _.get(foo, 'bar.baz')

And you can even set a default value to return if it is: https://lodash.com/docs/4.17.11#get

[freewilly1040 → lobo_tuerto]

The point isn't that it's an unsolvable problem, the point is that you have to resort to clunky syntax or a 3rd party library to do this. And for something as basic as this, there's probably a number of different libraries that solve the same problem a slightly different way.

[hombre_fatal → lobo_tuerto]

You lose all static analysis with that including Typescript checking/inference.