> I guess you mean the opposite hasn't > prevented Ruby from being popul... | Hacker News

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pyre on Oct 11, 2011 | parent | context | favorite | on: Why Dart is not the language of the future.

  > I guess you mean the opposite hasn't
  > prevented Ruby from being popular.

I was stating something more like "the fact that there is a hard split between numbers and booleans, and everything -- barring null -- by default evaluates to true." Since everything is a object instance in Ruby, asserting a variable is basically only evaluating whether or not it is null.

dlitz on Oct 12, 2011 [–]

null or false, actually.

pyre on Oct 12, 2011 | [–]

Slip of the tongue. ;) But the easiest way to think about it is something like:

  type(x) == Boolean ? x == True : x != nil

Disclaimer: That may not be valid Ruby, as I only have a passing knowledge of some bits of Ruby.

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