alt Hacker NewsOne thing I do quite frequently which is related to this (and possibly is a pattern in rails) is to use times in place of Booleans.
So is_deleted would contain a timestamp to represent the deleted_at time for example. This means you can store more information for a small marginal cost. It helps that rails will automatically let you use it as a Boolean and will interpret a timestamp as true.
Replies
noman-land • 04/24/2025
This is all well and good until you need to represent something that happened on Jan 1 1970 00:00 UTC.
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hadriendavid • 04/24/2025
« Anytime you store Boolean, a kitten dies » Nobody has ever said that but nobody wants any kitten to die so nobody has ever challenged me anytime I use that statement.
acedTrex • 04/23/2025
This one little change alone can bring such huge benefits later.
I consider booleans a code smell. It's not a bug, but it's a suggestion that I'm considering something wrong. I will probably want to replace it with something more meaningful in the future. It might be an enum, a subclass, a timestamp, refactoring, or millions of other things, but the Boolean was probably the wrong thing to do even if I don't know it yet.