Then you’d need to do something else.

Precisely my point.

And I’m not advocating for any of that. That’s just weird design, both of them, and as such a good example of something that warrants a bigger redesign in general.

Just advocating for clear, sensible, self-documenting and most importantly, expandable and maintainable code.

What’s idiomatic varies between languages and the conventions aren’t the same even then, when arguing across disciplines. This discussion seems to be more about different educations. I can get your point but from my personal experience in academia and working in the field it sounds undesired. But that’s just it. My, as in extremely limited, perspective. From your pov what you argue here is probably equally correct to what I think from mine is from my pov, it’s just a difference in the segment of the field we work in I suppose. Or plain old cultural differences.

Whichever it is, I bet we both can find better use for our time. I’m thankful for the time and effort though, even if I wasn’t persuaded. Sorry to have prolonged it so.

That is all just external implementation details. Not sure if it was you or someone else, but the main argument in defense of the OP as in it reasonable, was that the name is wrong. That it ought to be idAdmin. None of what you just described should have anything to do with user being or not being an admin. In place of checking “isAdmin” for null, the semantical and resourcewise equivalent would be a third variable for “admin rights having been validated” or whatever. Conflating it in this one variable while renaming it to isAdmin or similar, would be even less sensical… what if somewhere else in the code you have to check whether the initial validations have been made (while the actual role or whether is admin or not is irrelevant), you’d have to check if isAdmin equals null, which in that context would be confusing, ambiguous (i.e someone reading that bit will not know this is what is being checked without additional documentation) and just a code smell in general. You do want to make the important things unambiguous and self-documenting. Even more so the bigger the codebase is and the more contributors there are across its lifetime and in parallel at any given time.

But if we go with the original meaning of roles overall, then the union type is just a code smell that warrants a proper role thing around it.

That all is besides the point. There’s no real advantage to use null instead of defaulting to false there… it’s semantically more accurate and also less wasteful in that other code does not have to worry about nulls which always leads to unnecessary overhead when false is already equivalent in your proposed example.

I don’t really follow you there, wouldn’t it be exactly the opposite and wouldn’t checking for nulls be, as a premise, more wasteful? But doesn’t really matter, time to digress. I’m conventionally educated as an engineer so what I know and find reasonable today might be outdated and too strict for most contemporary stuff.

Yeah obviously with constants for the set roles per value. Some languages call them enums, but the point is that what we pass and use is always still the smallest integer type possible. With the extra bonus that if the roles ever become composable, the same value type would likely suffice for a bitflag and only thing needing refactoring would be bitshifting the constants.

But anyway, this turns out to be the weirdest hill I find myself willing to die on.

Yeah, but if it is about being an admin or not, hence the bool, it’d be idiomatic and reasonable to assume it to be false if we have no data. Unless we want to try and allow admin access based on no data. Having three states for a simple binary state is weird. And if it is not about just being an admin or not, the bool is inherently a too limited choice for representation.

Admin is a role though, was my point. And besides, if you check for three different states, and you decide to go with a boolean to represent that, I really find it hard to believe anyone would think it reasonable. It’s valid and it’s practical, but can you really say it’s reasonable?

I don’t do typescript, but wouldn’t a union of a null and a bool be just more resource intensive than simply using an unsigned byte-sized integer? I struggle to find reasons to ever go for that over something more reasonable and appropriate for what it attempts to represent (3 distinct states as it stands, and likely in future more than just 3 when they have a need for more granularity, as you’d often do with anything you’d need an admin role distinction in the first place), but likely I’m just not familiar with ts conventions. Happy to hear the reasoning for this though.

Yeah let’s use a union of a boolean and null to represent role, something that inherently represents more than two (…or three, I guess) different values, as opposed to something like an integer.

Even if the name is clearly misleading in this specific case, the entire choice of using a bool here is just bad because it’s almost guaranteed you’re going to expand on that in future and then you’ll just have to entirely rewrite the logic because it simply can’t accommodate more than two values (or three with the null union… 🙈), while it gives absolute zero benefits over using something more reasonable like an integer to represent the roles, or in this case, admin, not-admin and guest. Even if you’ll end up with just admin, non-admin and guest, the integer would still work great with no disadvantages in terms of amount of code or whatever. Just increased legibility and semantical accuracy.

Not to mention that there’s zero reason to combine the state of being logged in and the role in which you’re logged in in one variable… those are two different things. They will remain two different things in future too…

I mean they’re already chaining elseifs (basically matching/switching, while doing it in an inefficient way to boot 🥴) as though there were an n amount of possible states. Why not just make it make sense from the start instead of whatever the hell this is?

I wasted some 2-3 years of my life in CSGO too when I was younger. All my free time, down the drain basically. It wasn’t even fun after a while, just a hard, tiring grind. Attempted to compete on semi-pro level, somehow got it to my head that it was possible. Did compete ultimately, but none of my teams made it. Never got anywhere and the day I finally got off it was the best day of my adult life. It was bad.

I feel ashamed to admit this out loud. It’s just so cringeworthy. But it does some good to keep my head level and remember the shortcomings of my younger days.

Nowadays the closest I get to “addiction” level is bingeing a few months worth of evenings on the likes of Crusader Kings 3, M&B Bannerlord, Stellaris or Rimworld. Much more sane since it’s not as intensive, it can be paused at any moment, and ultimately there’s an end to it, so it just naturally withers away from my days eventually.