Words and their meaning

Words have meaning and developers often get things wrong in their first drafts (but which they rarely fix)

A common case is an application developer who creates a message:

ℹ️ You haven’t hidden anyone yet.

The logic they use for it is:

if (hidden_users.count == 0) {
  show_message("You haven’t hidden anyone yet")
} else {
  show_list(hidden_users)
}

What goes wrong

A user uses the hide feature and then uses the unhide feature and then goes to the view which shows:

ℹ️ You haven’t hidden anyone yet.

But, that's wrong. The user has in fact exercised the feature twice.

What to do instead

Instead of treating the state as a boolean:

count	message
0	you haven't message (never used)
1+	show list

Treat it as a tristate:

count	message
-1	you haven't message (never used)
0	you don't have message (you've used but aren't currently using)
1+	show list

How precisely you manage this will depend on your application's specific persistence structure.

Ideally, for the case I'm picking on, the message could have said something like:

ℹ️ You aren't currently hiding anyone.

Note that if you really don't want to store the extra -1 (uninitialized) state, you could just use this message to handle both -1 and 0. There's nothing wrong with showing this message to users in either category. Whereas showing the -1 message (You haven’t hidden anyone yet.) to users in the 0 state (who have hidden someone) is definitely wrong.

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This is a plea to the average developer: Be better than the average developer at big companies. I regularly see this mistake from NYSE top 25 companies.