May 11, 2026
True, False, Total Chaos
I keep tripping over "true, false, true"
Programmers are fed up with mystery yes-no code and the comments got spicy fast
TLDR: A developer called out confusing code that uses strings of yes-or-no settings, saying it slows everyone down because readers have to guess what each one means. In the comments, people split between “make it explicit” and “don’t overcomplicate it,” turning a tiny coding gripe into a surprisingly fiery readability war.
A seemingly tiny coding annoyance has turned into full-on comment section theater: developers are venting about those dreaded lines packed with mystery yes/no switches, like true, false, true, that force you to stop, squint, and play detective. The original complaint was simple: when a line of code makes even its own author scroll away to remember what it means, something has gone wrong. The proposed fix? Write it in a way that actually says what’s happening, instead of making readers decode a secret message.
But the real fireworks came from the crowd. One camp basically said, “Yes, this is awful, make it readable!” with people praising object-style inputs as the closest thing to named settings in JavaScript. Another camp pushed back hard, warning that this can become a team obsession and add extra baggage everywhere. One commenter even waved the old-school flag for bitmasks, arguing that ADMIN | SENDMAIL is way clearer than a soup of random true and false values. Others tossed in quieter fixes like documentation notes, while one commenter dropped the gloriously dramatic phrase “boolean blindness”, which sounds less like a coding issue and more like a medical emergency.
The vibe? Equal parts therapy session and nerd cage match. Everyone agrees unreadable code is a time thief. They just can’t agree on whether the cure is elegant, verbose, or a language redesign.
Key Points
- •The article examines how multiple positional boolean arguments make function calls harder to read and understand.
- •It uses examples such as `createUser(user, true, false);` and `updateSettings(user, true, false, true, false);` to show how readers must decode argument meaning.
- •The article says inline comments explaining boolean parameters indicate that the function API may be unclear.
- •It recommends replacing positional booleans with options objects so argument names appear directly at the call site.
- •It also suggests that some boolean flags represent distinct actions and may be better expressed as separate functions, while noting that a single obvious boolean can still be acceptable.