[Tutor] “has a value of True” versus “evaluates true”

[Danny Yoo]

> Unlike some languages, which choose confusing and arbitrary sets of
> values that count as truthy or falsey, Python encourages a simple
> distinction, something versus nothing. Values which represent some kind
> of "nothing" are falsey:


Hi Steven,

Sure.  I'm not arguing that Python's choices of what's truthy or
falsey isn't consistent or hard to remember.  What I'm saying is that
I personally have to deal with multiple languages at once these days.
(JavaScript is the big one.)  I find one of the points where things
seem needlessly divergent is truthiness.  Given that, I personally
subset the language so that I don't have to spend brainpower on this
issue.

As a confession: I have run and introduced bugs where the root cause
was one language's truthiness table diverging from another.  Given
that I recognise that I make this particular class of mistake a bit
more frequently than I'd like, I try to account for this personal
weakness and engineer for it.  I am not clever.


>> To quote: "Let your statement be: 'Yes, yes', or "no, no': anything beyond
>> these is of evil."
>
> "Have you stopped abusing small children yet?"

:(

I don't understand what your response here means.  My intent in
quoting Matthew 5:37 was purely as a joke, precisely because the quote
is so ridiculously out of context and definitely not intended to apply
to the boolean context of programming languages.  My apologies if you
didn't like that.