People have different preferences when it comes to coding styles. There are some that are subjective (balance between clarity vs. simplicity), and there are idiotic styles such as
!Boolean.FALSE.equals(aBoolean), or if (((((a == true) == true) == true) == true) == true).
The point is that using (a == true) instead of a is idiotic. Now, there are good semantic reasons to use (a == true) in some languages, but we're not talking about that, we're talking purely about style. It's no different from doing (a && true) or (i + 0) or (f * 1.0) when a, i and f would suffice. Not only is it longer, it forces you to stop and think, was there a good reason why this was being done? Can a hold truthy values that the programmer's trying to exclude? Otherwise, it's a sign of a programmer that doesn't know what he's doing - I've spent a decent amount of time teaching and grading and you see this a lot in first-year school assignments, rarely in high-quality production code. In almost all cases, it's a holdover from someone going in their head "if a is true" (because "if a" doesn't read well in human languages) and writing that out, not some kind of conscious effort to make the code more readable.
> In almost all cases, it's a holdover from someone going in their head "if a is true" (because "if a" doesn't read well in human languages) and writing that out,
It's interesting you admit that people are doing it "the long way" because that's how it naturally flows out of their head.
Doesn't it make sense that it would naturally flow into their head the same way?
What's the goal here - write very tight, concise code that fits some arbitrary standard of "correct"?
Or to write code that flows out of and into people's heads easily?
I was describing first-year students who are reading code as though it's written in a foreign language, not anyone with some degree of competence. For obvious reasons, professionals should not be internally verbalizing as they write or read code, any more than a fluent French speaker should be internally translating from English as they speak French.
