Because Twitter eats whitespace...

fucking_twitter.rb

# The example I tweeted about preferring the more verbose if..then..else..end 
# over ternary operations in Ruby got mangled by Twitter.

# So when my tweet showed everything on one line my message got muddled. 
# The reformatting of my tweet also looked like I was trying to evaluate 
# an expression that returned literally "true" or "false" which wasn't the case.

# What I wanted to show was that many people write IF/ELSE statements as 
# ternary operations.

class MyContrivedExample; def self.i_am_true?; true; end; end

x = MyContrivedExample.i_am_true? ? "foo foo foo" : "bar bar bar"

# I like to write them as full IF/ELSE expressions
y = if MyContrivedExample.i_am_true?
    then "foo foo foo"
    else "bar bar bar"
    end

# People tend to try to conserve horizontal space over vertical space. 
# 1. Anything but the most trivial example becomes unreadable in a single 
#    line as the ":" operator usually ends up off screen.
# 2. Our eyes are trained to read lines very quickly over a lifetime of 
#    reading top-to-bottom and left-to-right (in western cultures).
# 3. Breaking the line and letting in some air (whitespace) then our eyes 
#    and brain get a break to make processing the logic easier.