Not - lemm.ee

Alright, spicy opinion time: I think, the ! operator is dumb.

It’s yet another symbol with a meaning, which people have to learn.

And it’s easy to overlook, especially in languages with parentheses in their if-conditions:

if (!list.isEmpty()) { ... }

I think that just a .not() method on Booleans is cooler:

if (list.isEmpty().not()) { ... }

You can do this in Rust, which is where I have that idea from: play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edi…

Rust Playground

A browser interface to the Rust compiler to experiment with the language

In a lot of computer contexts (not coding, in my case) <> functions as not equal, which I think is pretty elegant since the meaning is derived from already existing mathematical symbols.

Not a programmer, just my two cents.