Look at this statement:
if (fortran == theRootOfAllEvil) {
...
}Why are those parentheses there?
Logical expressions work just fine without them:
fortran == theRootOfAllEvil ? "yes" : "no?"So why are they there?
A Journey into Antiquity.
When I was at school, back in the dark ages, I desperately thirsted to know more programmings languages. We had been taught BASIC and been given a few, all too brief, examples of other languages - languages that have long since been forgotten - like Cobol, Fortran and Algol.
I asked the teacher "But, Sir, what do these examples actually do?" and I got back the response "Just copy them down into your book!!!"
I needed to know more. And in our school library, there was a long ignored book on Fortran which I happily took home and digested. If was like that scene from Hidden Figures when Katherine finds the book - except I'm not a black woman in the American 1960s and I could just borrow the book and take it home without being chased by a security guard.
Now one of the things I learned was that Fortran completely
ignored ALL whitespace. So the assignment
A = 2 * 3 would be rendered into
A=2*3 before compilation. But that's fine and
dandy - it's still valid, it still compiles.
But if we look at an IF statement, things are
different IF A .EQ. 5 THEN renders down into
IFA.EQ.5THEN. The equality operator is still fine
as only operators start and end with a dot. But the poor old
compiler didn't have a clue what to do with the
IFA or the 5THEN.
The solution was to parenthesise the expression
IF(A.EQ.5)THEN - everything nicely tokenised -
problem solved!
But What's This Got to do With JavaScript?
Well, we've all met that one Java programmer who insists that all software should be written in Java, or his older brother who insists that all software must be written in C. It's like the vulgar Anglophone, who loudly enquires "Why can't these foreigners speak English, just like everybody else does?".
Back in the long ago, before there was such a thing as C. The "only language you need for everything" was Fortran. And there was such a programmer who was working on an operating system (that went on to be quite famous) and so desperately wanted to be allowed to write it in Fortran.
But his colleagues were working on a new replacement for Pascal, a horribly underpowered language with a silly name: "C" But they knew that if they didn't make it at least smell a little bit like Fortran their partner would never use it... And so they added a little eau de Fortran in the form of, now completely redundant parentheses around the logical expression in the "if" statement.
Fast forward to the 1990s and "C is the new Fortran"... every new language has to smell a little of C or nobody will touch it (God bless you, Guido van Rossum) and many of our new languages still carry that emotional baggage from C and Fortran.
Afterthought
Oh, by the way, I wrote ONE library to calculate hyperbolic functions for my "O"‑Level Computer Studies project and then never ever ever touched Fortran again.
... Sadly, the spectre of C has never left my side.