Helper variables have a serious place in growth phase, when you typically have lots of new devs and lots of bad code. $user_authenticated = hmac_auth($_get['to

Helper variables have a serious place in growth phase, when you typically have lots of new devs and lots of bad code. $user_authenticated = hmac_auth($_get['token']) === true || ldap_check($username, $config['ldap_restrictions']) || verify_credentials($_post['user'], $_post['pass']) === true; Sorry for the php pseudo code, I'm on mobile. And this is a very friendly example of what I'm trying to get across. It's self documenting code and worth the extra bytes. I've seen way too many insane conditionals to agree that less code is better.