It's not a cargo cult thing, it's inherited wisdom borne out by painful experience. Like goto and braceless single-expression blocks they are so easy to misuse

It's not a cargo cult thing, it's inherited wisdom borne out by painful experience. Like goto and braceless single-expression blocks they are so easy to misuse that they can easily be much more trouble than they're worth. Simple ternaries can be useful in trading off the unreadability of verbosity for the unreadability of compactness. Real Programmers should know how and when to use them. But nested ternary expressions are basically trolling...