Let there be Truth




Jan 2, 2016

Okay, so here's the deal. The idea of "truthy" and "falsy" values is a pretty common language pattern these days that saves us all some time and effort. I've been thinking about it lately and I think we made a pretty big mistake as to the implementation of this idea in most languages, namely that 0 is usually considered "falsy". Why did we do that? Yes, I know that it's how false was represented in C, but modern languages aren't C and they can make their own choices. We have types and classes and all sorts of nice tools now, we don't need 0 to represent false.

So what should 0 be then? I think we should revisit this and actually think about it rather than just allowing old limitations to make our decision for us. I'm going to make the case that 0 should be truthy, the argument for this is very simple: 0 is a value. In most cases where I've seen truthyness and falsyness used in code it's used to check whether a variable has a value; something like if(account){do stuff with account}. We need to check that the 'account' we returned from a function or API call actually exists before we perform operations on it, ensuring that it isn't 'null' or 'None' or something like that. This case works great, but what about this: if(number_of_accounts){do stuff} else {raise APIError}? Granted, this is a simplified case that won't come up often, but in this case if there are 0 accounts, our code will raise an APIError rather than executing our operation. In this case 0 is clearly a value, and so should be considered truthy.

While the previous example may seem contrived, it comes from a real-life case that I dealt with at work one day. We were doing some pretty complex work with web forms using JavaScript and had multiple field-types in the form. Some of these fields used numerical values, and since if (value !== null && value !== undefined) is a bit wordy, in most cases we were just using if (value). This worked great in almost all cases, including checking whether or not the user had typed in a text field ("" is falsy). Unfortunately we hadn't handled the case where the value of a numerical field was 0, and were incorrectly throwing validation errors. We knew 0 was a value, but JavaScript disagreed and treats it as falsy, causing us a bug or twelve.

I'm sure we're not the only ones to have made that mistake. Clever folks can probably come up with some case where it makes sense for 0 to be falsy, but I think that the value-checking scenario I've presented above is the most common use-case of truthy/falsy by far.

It's unfortunate, but languages are largely undecided on truthy/falsy. Python has all of '', 0, {}, [] and None as falsy values, in JavaScript 0, '', null, and undefined are all falsy, but [] and {} are truthy! PHP even considers '0' to be false! Ruby has the strict definition that only nil and False are considered falsy, everything else (including 0, '', [], {}) are ALL considered true!

I'm still undecided as to the fate of '', [], and {}, but I think it's time for 0 to be truthy.

Hopefully you learned something 🤞! If you did, please consider checking out my book: It teaches the principles of using optics in Haskell and other functional programming languages and takes you all the way from an beginner to wizard in all types of optics! You can get it here. Every sale helps me justify more time writing blog posts like this one and helps me to continue writing educational functional programming content. Cheers!