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Comment by Kapow | Hacker News Reader

That's just a ternary operator. I use that in Java all the time.

    value = boolean ? this_value : other_value;

If the branching logic gets too complicated, I usually move it into a function (private method) with a return in each branch.

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And in Javascript, once do-expressions go from a proposal to a common part of the language, this will be a thing:

  let value = do {if (boolean) { this_value } else { other_value }}

...which is even closer to the Elixir style than JS's ternary operator (which is identical to Java's).

What's the advantage over JS's ternary operator?

I guess it depends on whether "if" is treated as an expression which returns a value, which I don't think is the case due to the fact that I don't think there is an implicit value return in JS (such as in Ruby; the final line in any scope is the value that scope returns; same as in Elixir)

The same pattern should be usable for things like switch statements.

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