The Daily WTF

When looking for representative lines, ternaries are almost easy mode. While there’s nothing wrong with a good ternary expression, they have a bad reputation because they can quickly drift out towards “utterly unreadable”.

Or, sometimes, they can drift towards “incredibly stupid”. This anonymous submission is a pretty brazen example of the latter:

return (accounts == 1 ? 1 : accounts)

Presumably, once upon a time, this was a different expression. The code changed. Nobody thought about what was changing or why. They just changed it and moved on. Or, maybe, they did think about it, and thought, “someday this might go back to being complicated again, so I’ll leave the ternary in place”, which is arguably a worse approach.

We’ll never know which it was.

Since that was so simple, let’s look at something a little uglier, as a bonus. “WDPS” sends along a second ternary violation, this

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