Link: Unconditional Programming

Michael Feathers’ (of Working Effectively With Legacy fame) post Unconditional Programming is well forth reading. I take the liberty of stealing parts of it:

Over and over again, I find that better code has fewer if-statements, fewer switches, and fewer loops. Often this happens because developers are using languages with better abstractions. [..] The problem with control structures is that they often make it easy to modify code in bad ways.

Includes a nice example of replacing if-else with much more readable and safer code:

A while ago, I was working on some Ruby code and I needed to write a ‘take’ function to take elements from the beginning of an array.  Ruby already has a take function on Enumerable, but I needed to special behavior.  If the number of elements I needed was larger than the number of elements in the array, I needed to pad the remaining space in the resulting array with zeros.

The naive if-based implementation:

  def padded_take ary, n
    if n <= ary.length
      ary.take(n)
    else
      ary + [0] * (n - ary.length)
    end
  end

The final one, which seems much nicer and easier to understand to me:

  def padded_take ary, n
    pad(ary, n).take(n)
  end

  def pad ary, n
    pad_length = [0, n - ary.length].max
    ary + [0] * pad_length
  end

Read the original post for a full discussion and explanation of why.

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