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.
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.
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.
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.
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.