alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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This seems at first like a controversial idea, but the more I think about it the more I like this thought technology. Merely the idea of asking myself if there's a better way to store a fact like that will potentially improve designs.
Booleans also force the true/false framing.
E.g. a field called userCannotLoginWithoutOTP.
Then in code "if not userCannotLoginWithoutOTP or otpPresent then..."
Thus may seem easy until you have a few flags to combine and check.
An enum called LoginRequirements with values Password, PasswordAndOTP is one less negation and easier to read.
Tangential: I was recently wishing that bitwise flags had better support in Postgres. For now, bools are just easier to work with
The way I think about it: a boolean is usually an answer to a question about the state, not the state itself.
A light switch doesn't have an atomic state, it has a range of motion. The answer to the question "is the switch on?" is a boolean answer to a question whose input state is a range (e.g. is distance between contacts <= epsilon).