Truthy and Falsy

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Little in the "real" world is black and white, but in the world of boolean logic, computers will find a way to evaluate any statement, object, or variable as true or false. As humans, we can conceive of such statements as:

1 < 2 			## true
ships.sunk?		## if true, a game of Battleship is over

But what about statements like:

if chair		## is a chair inherently true or false?
unless 1		## what about the number 1?

These statements would sound more than a little crazy in natural language, but in computer science they often have a sound purpose: to check whether an error has occurred, whether a user has entered some value, or whether something unexpected has happened.

For instance, we might say:

if @user

To determine whether or not a user object exists. This statement will evaluate to true if a user is signed in, and false if a user is not.

But Boolean logic varies across languages. Let's look at some of the differences between Ruby and Javascript:

Knowing the truthiness and falsiness of various types in your languages of choice is important--you can see it's easy to get tripped up when transitioning!