alt Hacker NewsMore concise? Yes.
More readable? I'm less convinced on that one.
Some of those edge cases and their effects can get pretty nuanced. I fear this will get overused exactly as the article warns, and I'm going to see bloody questions marks all over codebases. I hope in time the mental overhead to interpret exactly what they're doing will become muscle memory...
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And more better? I'm not sure either.
In all these examples I feel something must be very wrong with the data model if you're conditionally assigning 3 levels down.
At least the previous syntax the annoyingness to write it might prompt you to fix it, and it's clear when you're reading it that something ain't right. Now there's a cute syntax to cover it up and pretend everything is okay.
If you start seeing question marks all over the codebase most of us are going to stop transpiling them in our head and start subconsciously filtering them out and miss a lot of stupid mistakes too.
Swift has had this from the beginning, and it doesn’t seem to have been a problem.
Oh come on just learn it properly it's not a big deal to read it
When the first wave of null check operators came out our code bases filled up with ? operators. I luckily had used the operator in swift and rust to somewhat know what it can do and what not. Worse the fact that unlike rust the ? operator only works on null. So people started to use null as an optional value. And I think that is at the core the problem of the feature. C# is not advertising or using this themselves in this way. I think the nullable checks etc are great way to keep NPE under control. But they can promote lazy programming as well. In code reviews more often than not the question comes up, when somebody is using ? either as operator or as nullable type like ‘string?’, are you sure the value should be nullable? And why are you hiding a bug with a conditional access when the value should never be null in the first place.