10 ms·

>Consider using a gender neutral title like Mx – or earn yourself a doctorate. Haha, yeah, I think if they'd go as far to assume all women there (or all women

>Consider using a gender neutral title like Mx – or earn yourself a doctorate. Haha, yeah, I think if they'd go as far to assume all women there (or all women past 30) have kids it would be pretty easy to assume any Doctor is a man. Also slight nitpick of the title: if(gender == "female" && married && age >= 30) would work just as well. But the use of strings for the gender field is excellent practice! Not only for non-binary gender(s) but also for "unknown" and any other edge cases.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
101008 5y ago
> Yeah, I think if they'd go as far to assume all women there (or all women past 30) have kids it would be pretty easy to assume any Doctor is a man. Sadly true. > But the use of strings for the gender field is excellent practice! Not only for non-binary gender(s) but also for "unknown" and any other edge cases. I can see this option more popular nowadays due to the gender discussion, but how did they manage unknown back in the day if they used a boolean for this (I assume something like isMale or isFemale)?
- diarrhea 5y ago
  For a third gender option of "unknown" you could extend the Boolean with FileNotFound, it's a classic trick really. https://thedailywtf.com/articles/what_is_truth_0x3f_ https://thedailywtf.com/articles/what_is_truth_0x3f_
- pdkl95 5y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20170914014648/https://qntm.org/gay https://web.archive.org/web/20170914014648/https://qntm.org/...
- GuB-42 5y ago
  In SQL it may be a NULL value, which has a weird logic but one that makes perfect sense here. Otherwise, it can be represented as two booleans, one that tells if the gender is specified, and another one for the gender itself. Or it can be a 3 value enum, which is my preferred solution, even if we don't consider non-binary genders. We should always consider the case when a field has no value. And I hope those who stored gender as a boolean did. Because what if you don't have that information? You can put a default (ex: male), but what if later, in another database, that person is explicitly female and you want to merge. You now have a conflict where you shouldn't.
maratc 5y ago
As a slight nitpick to your slight nitpick, non-zero numbers, non-empty strings, non-void pointers, non-empty arrays and more are known to evaluate to TRUE in boolean contexts. So, values of 12L, "empty", &gender and [null] for the `married` variable would break your condition but not the original one.
watwut 5y ago
if(gender == "male" && married && age >= 32) would likely work too.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

101008 5y ago

> Yeah, I think if they'd go as far to assume all women there (or all women past 30) have kids it would be pretty easy to assume any Doctor is a man. Sadly true. > But the use of strings for the gender field is excellent practice! Not only for non-binary gender(s) but also for "unknown" and any other edge cases. I can see this option more popular nowadays due to the gender discussion, but how did they manage unknown back in the day if they used a boolean for this (I assume something like isMale or isFemale)?

diarrhea 5y ago
For a third gender option of "unknown" you could extend the Boolean with FileNotFound, it's a classic trick really. https://thedailywtf.com/articles/what_is_truth_0x3f_ https://thedailywtf.com/articles/what_is_truth_0x3f_
pdkl95 5y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20170914014648/https://qntm.org/gay https://web.archive.org/web/20170914014648/https://qntm.org/...
GuB-42 5y ago
In SQL it may be a NULL value, which has a weird logic but one that makes perfect sense here. Otherwise, it can be represented as two booleans, one that tells if the gender is specified, and another one for the gender itself. Or it can be a 3 value enum, which is my preferred solution, even if we don't consider non-binary genders. We should always consider the case when a field has no value. And I hope those who stored gender as a boolean did. Because what if you don't have that information? You can put a default (ex: male), but what if later, in another database, that person is explicitly female and you want to merge. You now have a conflict where you shouldn't.

maratc 5y ago

As a slight nitpick to your slight nitpick, non-zero numbers, non-empty strings, non-void pointers, non-empty arrays and more are known to evaluate to TRUE in boolean contexts. So, values of 12L, "empty", &gender and [null] for the `married` variable would break your condition but not the original one.

watwut 5y ago

if(gender == "male" && married && age >= 32) would likely work too.