Benefits of using short-circuit evaluation

Question

boolean a = false, b = true;
if ( a && b ) { ... };

In most languages, b will not get evaluated because a is fals

Answer 1

First, your friend is wrong. Short-circuit evaluation (aka minimal evaluation) is available in most languages and is better than nested ifs for parallel languages (in which case the first of the conditions that returns will cause execution to continue)

In any case, even in a straightforward non-parallel language I don't see how nested ifs would be faster as execution would block until the first condition is evaluated.