You don’t actually NEED if statements (ever)

Sure they’re a nice and easy way to create control flow, but you can write many billions of lines of conditional JS code without a SINGLE if statement.

And there are many situations where a different construct shows what you wanna do way more clearly — something we can’t ignore as long we write code for humans.

Not to mention lower verbosity and shorter code…

So: let’s look at some powerful if statement upgrades📈.

1. The AND (&&) operator

The && operator, unique to JavaScript.

With it I quickly go from this:

To this:

I’ve eradicated the nested and compacted the branching logic into a one-liner.

You want to use this when there’s an if but no matching else; especially when the if block has only one line.

Even if there are multiple lines you can abstract them into a separate function and apply…