Intention Hidden In Implementation And Misty Edge of Validity

“The code is the documentation” – except that from poorly written code you cannot tell what is an intrinsic part of the solution and what is an accidental implementation detail. And a piece of code can rarely handle any possible data – yet, without a good documentation or precondition checks, you can’t even guess at what are valid or unexpected inputs. Today we will explore a piece of JavaScript code that both hides the intention in the implementation (the “why” is not clear from the “what” the code does) and operates correctly only under particular but unstated conditions.

Method Promiscuity Or The Case For Encapsulation

We have here a Python API for fetching data from Mongo and either returning the raw JSON or a formatted, “parsed,” one. There is certainly a number of things that could be improved (it has been written by a non-programmer and no Python expert, so it is actually a real achievement for him) but what I want to focus on is the API exposed to the clients.

It troubles me because the API exposes too many details about its inner workings and forces the clients to know them.