What comes to mind when I say the word “success”?

Everyone has their own definition: Advancing in one’s career; saving enough to retire; finding a significant other with whom to build a happy, healthy family. Complicating matters further, “success” has much finer-grained contexts: Each successive day of kicking a bad habit; completing a project milestone; passing a test in school. Many “personal improvement” programs would even propose that “success” is only measurable as a continuing accumulation of completed milestones, not any one observable point in time.

So why in the world do you think you can capture “success” in a boolean?

BOOL success = [self doSomething];

That method you just called actually did something, and it did something concrete: It deleted (or saved) a file on disk; parsed some JSON; validated an encrypted string.

Don’t try to capture success in a variable. Name your booleans for what the code actually accomplishes and you’ll find the following logic is much more readable with a decreased likelihood of logic bugs.