Kinda feel silly but I can't wrap my head around p...

# getting-started

[Colton Idle]

Kinda feel silly but I can't wrap my head around people using different functions to essentially just do a null check. I still find if (myItem != null) { //do something } makes sense in kotlin as it does in java. Is using let{} really needed? Would someone say that my if statement is not idiomatic? I like to follow the 90 day rule. If I come back to the code in 90 days... which one will I understand? I feel that most would choose the if.

[Pete]

I wondered this too. There is a discussion in the forums that might be interesting to you (it was for me): https://discuss.kotlinlang.org/t/let-vs-if-not-null/3542

As usual it seems to come down to preference. In that post there are many approaches including someones custom rolled helper

[Matteo Mirk]

After some time spent looking at other people’s kotlin code I can tell there’s a tendency to overuse block functions to try and squeeze null checks and if/else in the same expression. Unfortunately this results in hard to read code, where a simple if would have sufficed. I noticed this trend being similar to the introduction of Optional in Java 8: lots of our production code became unreadable because they had to forcefully use Optional everytime! gosh… 🤦‍♂️

[Colton Idle]

Thanks. I just ran into an issue where I was using let{} instead of ?let{} and got completely different behavior. Had no idea. 😄 Still taking some time to get used to all of these block functions.

[SiebelsTim]

When you have a shared variable, eg a property, and you want to perform a null check, you need a local variable to ensure another thread doesnt change the variable. A ?.let{} is easier than introducing a local variable most of the time. Or when chaining a few calls. Otherwise I prefer simple ifs over the heavy use of those block functions.