ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Yoda conditions

Yoda conditions are a way of writing computer code that may seem a little weird at first. Imagine that you're watching Star Wars and you see Yoda talking. Yoda often says things backwards, like "Do or do not, there is no try". In the same way, Yoda conditions are written backwards compared to how you might expect them to be.

For example, let's say we have a variable called "count" that represents how many apples we have:

if (count == 5)

This is the normal way of writing an if statement. We're checking if "count" is equal to 5. But with Yoda conditions, we would write it like this:

if (5 == count)

See how we put the number 5 first, and then the variable "count"? This seems strange, but it can actually be helpful for avoiding bugs in our code.

The reason for this is that sometimes when you're writing code, you might accidentally use a single equals sign instead of two. A single equals sign would assign a value to a variable instead of checking if it's equal to something.

So if we accidentally wrote this:

if (count = 5)

we would set "count" equal to 5 instead of checking if it's equal to 5. This could cause problems later on in our code.

But if we write it in Yoda conditions like this:

if (5 == count)

the code won't even compile if we accidentally use a single equals sign. That's because you can't assign a value to the number 5. This makes it less likely for us to make that mistake.

Overall, Yoda conditions might seem strange at first, but they can be useful for avoiding bugs in our code. Just remember to put the number or value first, and the variable second!