THtheanonymousone·Oct 25, 2026Submission
If-then-else had to be invented (2020)
174 points · Open discussione-n-f
if-then-else
OPEN SOURCE2020–2026
e-n-f / if-then-else
if-then-else
!!Con West 2019 talk
7Distinct people
9Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
372GitHub stars
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What it is
!!Con West 2019 talk
GitHub
Where it is used
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year9 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2020-12-13 04:07:07 UTC to 2026-10-25 16:05:56 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
9 sourcesThe interesting thing is that the weird 'else' keyword actually was invented by German speakers:
https://github.com/e-n-f/if-then-else/blob/master/if-then-el...
In Rost – Rust Programming in GermanI agree that English as lingua franca of computing makes sense, especially when communicating with non-(German)-native speakers. But one important reason why German is no longer viable for this is the terrible state of translation from English to German. Instead of using the "established" German terms, English terms are usually translated word-by-word to German without context, either by machine translation, or bad human translators who don't have a technological background (for instance for a long time, "link time code generation" was called "Link Zeitcode Generierung" in MSVC's German documentation, which doesn't have anything to do with LTCG even though it is correct German and a (mostly) correct word-by-word translation of the English term).
And instead of this butchering of the fine German engineering language, just switching to Engl
Read the rest
ish is indeed the better alternative (and less painful).
My favourite trivia btw is that the 'else' in 'if-else' is a "bad" translation from German into English ;) (https://github.com/e-n-f/if-then-else/blob/master/if-then-el...)
There is a neat history of the early syntax of conditional expressions here https://github.com/e-n-f/if-then-else/blob/master/if-then-el... titled “if-then-else had to be invented”. It seems “else” originated in Algol 60 as a hasty translation from German. The CPL project started in the early 1960s when it was not yet certain that Algol-style block structure and keywords would become the common basis of most programming languages.
In “A damn stupid thing to do” – The origins of CPL, BCPL, and C (2020)Not to mention that linux-pam's `[success=2 default=ignore]` isn't even standard, I think OpenPAM only has the five control flags required/requisite/sufficient/binding/optional. (One may reasonably despair as to the difference between "required" and "requisite".)
It's almost as if PAM were developed before the invention of the if-then-else construct in the 1950s.[0]
[0]: https://github.com/e-n-f/if-then-else/blob/master/if-then-el...
In The Surreal Horror of PamIf-then-else had to be invented
34 points · Open discussion> If you look at, say, the evolution of the “if” statement, it was a number of years before this “obvious” control structure was added to programming languages
As described [0] and discussed [1] a few weeks ago. Fascinating.
[0] https://github.com/ericfischer/if-then-else/blob/master/if-t...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25406211
In Errors vs. exceptions in Go and C++ in 2020If-then-else had to be invented
414 points · Open discussionif...then...else had to be invented (2019)
32 points · Open discussion