by replacing tokens recognizable as natural language words with arbitrary punctuation
It's far from "arbitrary" --- and I suspect that this dogmatic, misguided way of (not) thinking about it is responsible for the majority of the complaints and aversion, since as others have mentioned, it is completely equivalent in structure to if/else!
What do I mean by "far from arbitrary"? Well... what is the character used in basically all Latin (and even some widely-used non-Latin) languages to denote a question? I've already used that character twice in this post so far, and you should've found the previous two sentences to be pretty clear, so stop pretending the ternary operator is something scary and "unreadable" and see it for what it is: it is literally asking a question!
It's far from "arbitrary" --- and I suspect that this dogmatic, misguided way of (not) thinking about it is responsible for the majority of the complaints and aversion, since as others have mentioned, it is completely equivalent in structure to if/else!
What do I mean by "far from arbitrary"? Well... what is the character used in basically all Latin (and even some widely-used non-Latin) languages to denote a question? I've already used that character twice in this post so far, and you should've found the previous two sentences to be pretty clear, so stop pretending the ternary operator is something scary and "unreadable" and see it for what it is: it is literally asking a question!