Let’s start with a simple example:

if(var == 1) {
   return true;
}

That’s as simple as an if condition could get, you would think! You can actually write the same like this:

if(var == 1)
    return true;

It has the exact same meaning. Then there are ternary operators:

var == 1 : true ? false;

This looks sexy, don’t you think? The more short hand code you use, the more smart you are. That’s the notion. Consider the first and the last examples above. The three line code snippet is old-school, boring, and common. But the one line weird looking ternary code is uncommon, and sexy-looking. But it’s old-school too. When they are both old-school, why is one so common than the other? I can think of a couple of reasons — it’s easy to read and understand.

It’s always a matter of convenience you see!

Most often than not, you’d need to extend snippets like these to add more statements into the if block or the else block. That’s just how programming works. In case of the first example, your new code would look something like this:

if(var == 1) {
    x = 2*y;
    return true;
}

That makes sense, and it was easy to modify too. Now how would you modify the second example? You’d say like this:

if(var == 1)
    x = 2*y;
    return true;

Now if this is a C/C++, Java, C#, JavaScript or PHP code, you have managed to introduce a bug. Because this is the same as writing:

if(var == 1) {
    x = 2*y;
}
return true;

But this is not what you intended. So the only way to fix this is:

if(var == 1) {
    x = 2*y;
    return true;
}

Now there is no difference between this and the very first example. I’m not even going to talk about ternary code here, for obvious reasons.