Poll of the Day > if conditions are an antipattern

(+) Yeah! (+)

theyre basically just gotos and goto is bad

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gosub

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chelsea_wtf posted...

theyre basically just gotos and goto is bad

I guess this is bait, but a goto is very specifically an unconditional jump

otherwise yes, too many ifs can definitely be a code smell (but not necessarily)

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Sahuagin posted...

too many ifs can definitely be a code smell

thats why its so important to have an AbstractConditionFactory to create a variety of different IBooleanHandlers so that your conditional handling logic can be dependency-injected instead of hardcoded. just having an if statement in your business logic is basically two different unconditional jumps combined into a conditional jump

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chelsea_wtf posted...

thats why its so important to have an AbstractConditionFactory to create a variety of different IBooleanHandlers so that your conditional handling logic can be dependency-injected instead of hardcoded. just having an if statement in your business logic is basically two different unconditional jumps combined into a conditional jump

the right approach can be to put the logic from each of the if blocks into their own classes and simply call a method on the abstract class or interface.

this comes up a lot when for example switching on enum types. IMO enums are generally an anti-pattern since they don't allow for any polymorphism or code reuse and you end up with these "logic varies with value" areas all over the place when they should be in that type itself instead.

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