On Thursday, 5 October 2023 at 00:53:45 UTC, claptrap wrote:
[...] he is has more interesting things to talk about than whether "enum { yes, no }" is a good idea or not.
His point here was not that having an enum with values for yes and no is a bad idea. The bad idea is assigning yes the value 0. That's a much more subtle point, as here nowhere 0 is written. That's what make this kind of mistakes so easy and I think it's well worth to explain it to less experienced programmers.
It's not easy to make simple looking code. That has nothing to do with (coding-)style, it is all about not defining things a different way than it is usually done, so nobody mix it up. Sometimes it's very hard to find the correct order of things - often even experiments are necessary to determine what "usually" means. What he says is: Invest your time to find out what "usually" means, and that is not trivial, even if it sounds like it is. It requires a lot of experience to come to this conclusion. Investing time to make things look easy and obvious is well worth it, despite you're likely not payed (or in your case: honored) for it.
