[shaboinkin]

I'm working in a codebase that has, at times, 10+ different expressions within a single conditional in many places, and trying to pull out the context of why the conditional exists in the first place make grug brain hurt. At the very least, you could put all of the expressions and assign to a boolean with a variable name saying wtf it is you're conditioning on.

https://grugbrain.dev/#grug-on-expression-complexity

[kingdomcome50]

Eh... I agree that the minimization of LoC is almost certainly not the most important vector on which to optimize, but I'm not convinced the example linked here is an improvement. The author is obviously correct that their version is easier to debug and slightly easier to understand, neither of these improvements, taken in isolation, satisfy these conditions when taken as a whole.

In terms of ease-of-debugging, sure, splattering local variables and extra control statements may allow you to break/inspect a certain class of bug in a certain way. But it also creates a lot of noise and makes the code a lot more "dense". It's hard to see given an example in isolation, but when all of your code looks like this it can make it significantly more "tiring" to understand. "Easy to debug", while important, is also something that must be balanced against other factors.

And in terms of easy-to-understand, again, I agree that the author's example has a slight edge (give the first one a shot though... it's not so bad). But what does it mean for a `Contact` to both be "inactive" and also "a family or friend"? They have forgotten to capture the single most important condition! Similar to my first point, it can be hard to see the issue when given an example in isolation, but imagine looking for whatever condition or rule the author is enforcing in a sea of other blocks that look similar.

A simple comment over the original version would suffice for me:

    // If the contact is stale