Hmm, I've read reasons why you could code like this, but personally I would never make my code more complicated to read just to prevent errors that I can prevent with other methods, like having tests, for example. I would assume after someone has been coding for a decent amount of time, they would have the experience to spot declaration/assignment mistakes and shouldn't have to rely on yoda conditionals to prevent this. Perhaps there's other reasons I'm not aware of, and am not seeing the light because of that, care to share your thoughts?

Wikipedia gives an explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoda_conditions Seems kind of meh, especially if you're writing javascript when keywords like undefined can be redefined with no effect.

In most environments, writing something like `if (x = 5)` will generate a warning.

E.g. if you use JSHint, you'd get:

"Expected a conditional expression and instead saw an assignment."

Nowadays, there usually isn't any benefit in using yoda conditions.

I don't, and I'd be really grateful if anyone would enlighten me on the matter. Please excuse my ignorance!