[rrradical]

Someone else addressed the details of your counter argument, but I'd like to respond to it generally.

It seems like every time someone writes an article on how to write better code, there are responses about how it doesn't make sense when taken to some logical extreme, or some special case, as if that invalidates the argument. (FP techniques in particular seem to provoke this.) But code design is like other design disciplines-- good techniques aren't always absolutes.

Do you really think that because the given example doesn't apply to every situation it's a 'straw man'? It is a little tiring to hear all code design advice dismissed this way.

[dwc]

Reading this article I immediately saw a couple of drawbacks. Since then I've thought of a few more. But several of the points made were not lost on me. This article made me think a bit, and I'm still thinking about it. That's worth something right there.

To anyone out there who clicked through to these comments and is thinking it's not worth reading the article, please go ahead and read it. It's short enough. You may or may not use fewer if-statements in the future, but it might give you a better sense of why you choose to do things one way over another.

[barrkel]

The article isn't balanced. It's suggesting that the direction of the refactoring is an unalloyed good, as I read it. I disagree.

I've seen junior devs take this kind of stuff literally and over-apply it, like it's a religious ritual that they get a pious buzz from adhering to. I'd prefer people to think first before regurgitating what they most recently learned.

[hyperpape]

I agree wholeheartedly. I think the boolean blindness concept that's in the background of this article is incredibly important. But if you're going to propose an actual concrete solution, you need to assess whether it will be right all of the time, most of the time, or situationally (edit: and any of those answers is ok--it's fine to have a pattern that sometimes works if its presented as such). That requires looking at the ways it can go wrong. And this article just didn't do that.

[unsignedqword]

The thing is that the tone of the article seems to suggest taking such an extreme: I mean, an "anti-if" campaign? There's like, only one sentence of concession near the end towards those unconvinced by the argument.

[bunderbunder]

FWIW, I'm pretty unimpressed by the anti-if campaign's website. They've clearly put style over substance. It's a beautiful website, but I spent some time poking through it and I can still only guess at what exactly they're on about. It seems to be something about if-statements being bad, but beyond that it's rather a muddle.

I'm trying to be charitable, though, so let's assume that the core of their idea is something coherent. I'm guessing it's really about something I do think is an important point: How inversion of control is a design pattern that lets you create code that's much easier to manage, because it greatly limits the extent to which certain kinds of decisions need to be federated throughout the codebase.

If that's the case, then real sin (and the article author's) is mistaking if statements for the problem. Conditional branching is not a problem; I think most of us can agree it's an essential operation. The real problem they should be after is poor encapsulation. Where if statements come into it is that, if you've got badly architected code with poor encapsulation, one of the symptoms you'll see is that there will be a proliferation of if-statements that crop up all throughout the code. Every single frobinator will need to stop and check whether the widget it's operating on is a whosit or a whatsit before it can take any sort of action whatsoever. Lord help us if we ever try to introduce wheresits into the system; we'll have to go modify 50 different files so we can replace all those if-statements with switch statements.

It's probably nowhere near as fun to write an article that advocates a high level design methodology as it is to write an article that makes a bold contrarian claim like "If statements bad", though.

[biocomputation]

You are totally right.

As an example, long if/else chains that check state can mean that you need another object, or another virtual function, or some other niblet of orchestration.

Likewise, I'm not really impressed by the anti-if campaign. At some point, abstractions cause the exact same problem they were designed to solve, and produce code that is difficult to reason about or change.

[rrradical]

The author is just examining a common design mistake-- there's no sin there. Many times, it's a mistake to pass in a boolean switch when you could instead pass in the predicate function itself. That's a solid example that supports the author's claim. Maybe you're not convinced, but that doesn't mean the article is completely misguided.

[cerebellum42]

Absolutely agree - if a campaign spouts "Destroy All Ifs" that kind of sets the tone for the discussion...

[thaumasiotes]

> There's like, only one sentence of concession near the end towards those unconvinced by the argument.

But that sentence is "I’m just joking about the Anti-IF campaign". Why would extra words help?

[Hermel]

The title says "destroy all ifs". The author already did take the idea to the extreme himself.

[jasode]

I can't read the author's mind and can't speak for him but I don't think each word (especially the word "all") is meant to be parsed literally.

Here's another website called "Destroy All Software" using a similar phrase: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/blog

Gary Bernhardt obviously doesn't advocate removing all software from the face of the Earth. Also notice that it includes blog titles with more bombastic titles:

  "One Base Class to Rule Them All"
  "Burn Your Controllers"

Those are probably not meant to be interpreted literally. There really is no single universal class that can be used for all cases in every circumstance. Instead of parsing it literally, it may be a riff on LOTR "the one ring to rule them all."

Likewise, don't eliminate your controllers because he said it's universal advice. Maybe the title is a riff on Cortez "burn your ships" or some other cultural meme like women's liberation of "burn your bra."

[rrradical]

It's true. Personally, I took that to be a bit tongue in cheek. I would compare it to "GOTO Considered Harmful"-- where the author wants you to imagine a world without such a technique in order to expand your abilities. (Even though there are probably edge cases where such usage is justifiable.)

[sgt101]

The stance is rather different though - "GOTO Considered Harmful" as a phrase is both inviting a discussion and making a limited statement. "Destroy all ifs" is definitive; the argument is over at the end of the phrase and there will be no negotiation or concessions. I know that this is trivial in this case, but I think it would help discourse in the world generally if we could move away from this kind of position taking and offer our opinions more gently.

As a community we should reward more nuanced and open statements.

[jasonm23]

Absolutely.

Simply replacing "ifs" with anything else.

I think it's clear how this is simply juvenile hyperbolic invective.

[_asummers]

"Ifs considered suboptimal" carries the spirit of Dijkstra and the general argument of the anti if folks.

[sgt101]

That would work

[chongli]

It is a little tiring to hear all code design advice dismissed this way.

I notice this form of dismissal in virtually all internet arguments. It's like most people aren't aware of the difference between a strong argument and a sound argument.

[ryanbrunner]

I think the problem is that most of these types of articles don't take your advice - the "broken" code that they are improving is absolutely wrong, and there's no room for contextual arguments whatsoever. I mean, the article we're discussing is on the topic of eliminating conditionals wherever possible - that's a hardline stance against something so commonplace in programming it's hard to imagine working without it.