The negative conditionals in code blocks are most of the time difficult to read and understand.

It becomes worse when you make the conditionals anti-negative.

Before

Try to read above code snippets and try to understand it. Please note the highlighted parts. Does that code read like

• When inverse of a package is not damaged then report an error: “Package is damaged”.
• When inverse of a package is not empty then report another error:
  “Package is empty”

Ouch! Unreadable? Complex? Painful, isn’t it? Let’s revisit the same condition with positive conditionals.

After

Another example:

Before:

Above snippet is showing hours logged for the day if it’s not a non-working day!

After

Now, this reads like a simple statement. Show hours logged if its working day.

Originally published at https://beingcraftsman.com on August 6, 2018.