Stringly Typed Booleans

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I’m getting rather hacked off seeing boolean properties typed as strings. Stringly typed is a phrase I learnt off a post from the excellent Coding Horror blog and it describes a phenomena whereby properties that are of a specific type, e.g. Boolean, Date, int, are stored needlessly as strings.

I’m working on a website that communicates with a money laundering service to check whether an individual is “bad” or not. Individuals can pass the test, but importantly it is possible to pass the test with some warning flags raised. If any of the warning flags are raised then an email should be sent off to compliance for them to do…whatever it is they do. Fair enough right?

The warning flags are obviously booleans. There was either a warning raised or there wasn’t – there are no two ways about it (no pun intended). In the serialized response, the warning flags are encoded as “Yes” or “No”…which is understandable. Now, upon receiving the response, it is parsed and turned into an internal representation. This is where things get really weird. The programmer that coded the object that stores the response from the service has decided to encode the warnings as strings, initialised to “”. Which is totally fucking bonkers.

Why?

Well, now our boolean warnings aren’t really booleans – they have WAY more than two possible values and the meaning of these values is subjective. One may consider “”, null, “No” as false, but could conceivably also consider “false” or “0″. We get the same sort of problem with true – “Yes”, “1″, “true” and then we get a whole load of unknown values which is every other possible string in the world. Which might be considered to be true.

So how the hell can any number of programmers work on this piece of code without introducing errors because of differing definitions of truthy and falsey values? Well, they can’t. To illustrate the problem further, even loosely typed languages differ in their boolean coercion, for example JavaScript and PHP:

<script>
if("0") alert('Opposite day!');
</script>

<?php
if("0") echo 'Opposite day!';
?>

JavaScript considers “0″ true but PHP considers it false. Personally I think JavaScript is “right” here, but as I said before, it is totally subjective.

The icing on the cake is of course the extra code you have to write to check the truthy or falsey string values. Something along the lines of “if x is not null and not empty and not the word No then it is probably true…probably”, which would otherwise have been coded as “if x then true” if x was a boolean – which is orders of magnitude shorter.

Of course, there are some bat shit crazy strongly typed languages that allow you to assign null to a Boolean, but that is a different story altogether.

13,522 thoughts on “Stringly Typed Booleans”

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  39. My name is Mike, a typical guy from the United States,
    and in the year 2018 I accidentally discovered one of the
    most bizarre sports I had ever seen: Car Jitsu.

    If you have never heard of it, most people haven’t.
    The entire concept sounds like a comedy sketch. Two athletes climb inside a compact vehicle and
    try to score positions against each other while being trapped between the dashboard
    and seats. No, I’m not kidding. In most sports you have a court, but in CarJitsu your battlefield is a car cabin. That is
    what makes it so weird.

    It even has official events and competitive tournaments.

    Participants gather from various regions and try to
    prove who can master the unusual format. Unlike traditional combat sports,
    every movement is limited by the tight space.

    This leads to funny situations. One second someone looks
    like a champion, and the next second they are trapped
    near the steering wheel.

    During those days I was heavily interested in unusual athletic events.

    I watched many sports events every week. I also spent
    time reading about betting markets. Many sports
    fans I knew compared sportsbook offers. Sometimes names like 1xbet would appear in conversations about major sporting events, although CarJitsu was usually too strange to be
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    The crowd energy was amazing. There were fans discussing sports, training, and competition. Some people even joked
    about which athlete would be the favorite if a betting site ever offered odds on the matches.

    Soon I wanted more than just watching. I signed up for beginner training.

    My debut practice was chaos. I hit my head on the
    roof, got stuck near a seat, and accidentally opened a door at the worst possible moment.
    Even I laughed at myself. Yet I kept coming back.

    As time passed, I improved. I learned how to use positioning,
    leverage, balance, and timing. The vehicle became familiar.
    Soon I was entering small tournaments. My friends thought I was completely crazy.

    Whenever someone asked what sport I practiced, the conversation usually went like this:

    “CarJitsu.”

    “What is that?”

    “Imagine wrestling inside a car.”

    “You’re joking.”

    “No, that’s the actual sport.”

    The most unforgettable competition happened at a major event.
    My opponent was built like a truck. He looked like he
    could bench-press a refrigerator. Before the match started,
    he smiled and said, “Hope you’re ready.” I should have
    listened.

    As soon as the fight started, chaos exploded.
    We bounced between seats, bumped into doors, and nearly tangled ourselves in everything inside the vehicle.
    The crowd was roaring. People were laughing and shouting.

    Then came the moment I will never forget.

    My opponent grabbed the car seat belt and accidentally turned it into what looked like
    a dangerous rope. As we struggled for position, the belt snapped across the cabin and wrapped
    around me in the strangest way imaginable.
    For a second I thought, “I can’t believe this is happening”

    He pulled, I twisted, the seat belt locked, the door opened slightly, and both of us somehow ended
    up tangled together like human spaghetti.
    The audience was laughing so hard that some people could barely stay
    in their seats. It looked completely ridiculous.

    For a brief moment, I genuinely thought my opponent
    was going to destroy me. Luckily, the officials quickly intervened when things became unsafe, and the situation was resolved without serious injury.

    Afterward we both burst out laughing. Everyone loved it. Even today people who were there still talk about “the legendary belt tangle.”

    Looking back, CarJitsu remains one of the most unusual sports I have ever experienced.

    It gave me great memories and incredible experiences.
    Whether people are discussing athletic entertainment, very few
    things create reactions like CarJitsu.

    When people want to hear a crazy sports story, I always tell them about
    the day I climbed into a car in 2018 and accidentally became a
    CarJitsu competitor. The reaction is always the same.
    But after hearing about tournaments, athletes, training sessions, sports fans,
    betting conversations, sportsbook discussions, and my unforgettable seat belt battle, they usually agree on one thing:

    CarJitsu is wonderfully ridiculous.

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