9 ms·

Anti-if: The Missing Patterns

130 points by joejag 10y ago

jduv 10y ago
I'm surprised there was no mention of the Specification pattern. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specification_pattern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specification_pattern
- daveguy 10y ago
  My god what an abomination of programming simplicity. Do people actually write code like this? It's as if someone said you must use interfaces and you must use objects for even the simplest boolean logic statement. I think I would claw my eyes out if I had to read and write code like this on a regular basis.
wtetzner 10y ago
> Context: You have a method that takes a boolean which alters its behaviour > Problem: Any time you see this you actually have two methods bundled into one. That boolean represents an opportunity to name a concept in your code. This is only true if you're using literal booleans at you call sites. If the booleans are coming from somewhere else, like user input, you just moved your single if statement in the method out to every call site. > Context: You are calling some other code, but you aren’t sure if the happy path will suceceed. > Problem: These sort of if statements multiply each time you deal with the same object or data structure. They have a hidden coupling where ‘null’ means someting. Other objects may return other magic values that mean no result. Passing a default value works, but in Java 8, returning an Optional is cleaner. And if you wanted a default value, you can still do repository.getRecord(123).orElse("Not found"); Edit: Also, the coping strategy link [1] he gave to remove exceptions sounds a lot like restarts in Commons Lisp's condition system. [1] https://silkandspinach.net/2014/11/06/on-paperboys-newsagents-and-exceptions/ https://silkandspinach.net/2014/11/06/on-paperboys-newsagent...
- ktRolster 10y ago
  This is why I never try to give prescriptions on code style.....whenever I think I have something good, someone else comes along with something better. And when I see someone else's advice, I can think of something better. And after I finish writing my own code, I can always look at it and think, "Oh, I could have done that better." See also: efficiency. There's always a way to make it more efficient.
- rtpg 10y ago
  I think if your boolean is coming from user input then refactoring your method to accept user input, and then wrapping your method with a helper function that does the user input call would still be good advice. At some point applying "anti-if" does involve major refactoring, so the outer style of your code might need to change a bit. Of course like all design patterns it's more of a thought experiment than a total prescription IMO. But taking the thought experiment to its logical conclusion can also yield interesting results. Some people might throw out strawman arguments about design patterns, but I'll end up reading the strawman and be like " yeah that does sound like a good idea". It's pretty hard to overestimate the value of regularity in code.
- kazinator 10y ago
  Common Lisp to the rescue! (defmethod make-sound ((b bear) (loud-p t))) ;; bear makes loud sound ...) (defmethod make-sound ((b bear) (loud-p null)) ;; bear makes quiet sound ...) If we call (make-sound bear-instance nil), the second method is invoked because loud-p is specialized to the null class, whose only instance is nil. (There is a type nil also, whose domain is the empty set: it has no instance.) If we call (make-sound bear-instance <any other value>), then the first specialization takes over. It's specialize to T, the grand superclass, so it is a fallback that takes anything. Any value other than nil serves as a Boolean true in Lisp. It's a magic of Lisp that T stands for "any type" as well as "true". :) I don't know whether treating Booleans as method parameters like this is good design, but I don't see any immediate down sides.
  - rtpg 10y ago
    Are the semantics to this comparable to Haskell's pattern matching on function arguments?
keenerd 10y ago
This reminds me of something I read on HN a while back and forgot to bookmark. (Naturally I've been unable to find it since.) I think the article was written by a company who made a static code analysis tool. They described how there wasn't a large difference in quality between FOSS and proprietary code, except for one detail: FOSS code used "else" statements much less. Anyone have any idea what I'm thinking of or if I'm even remembering it correctly?
- majewsky 10y ago
  Did you try http://hn.algolia.com http://hn.algolia.com ?
- douche 10y ago
  That does sound familiar. Was it possibly from either the NDepend blog, or more likely, the PVS-Studio blog?
efraim 10y ago
Misko Hevery did a Google Tech Talk about this some years ago, he also use a very similar example with switching on the birds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F72VULWFvc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F72VULWFvc
- simonhorlick 10y ago
  This. If there's anything that's made me a better programmer it's Misko's talks.
predavlad 10y ago
Good luck doing that in a production environment, and not while "theorycrafting". You have waaaay too much free time.
- dang 10y ago
  Please keep snark and personal swipes off HN.
tgb 10y ago
I'm afraid the article has left me unconvinced. I'm open to having my mind changed on the matter, though. The point of passing boolean params instead of named functions is that most of the time there is shared code between the two paths and not literally all the code is enclosed in either the if or the else block. If the author was intending just to restrict to that one specific case where there was no overlap whatsoever, then I guess I would agree but I'm not sure how often that happens. Polymorphism has some advantages but it's certainly got it's own troubles in terms of understand-ability. The author links to an article which even states "I think that we hate conditionals more than we should. Introducing polymorphism too soon will complicate your code, making it hard to understand and test." It then goes on to give an example where it says polymorphism is actually the right choice, to avoid two switches. I'd say that at least this trivial example would be best handled by some data-driven approach. Look up salaries in a database instead. The inline statement one can certainly be better in some cases, but the example given is quite poor. What does "foo && bar || baz" mean? Well, now I have to remember the order of operations ... 'or' after 'and' I guess. Surely this is easier to misread than the if statement example, which in my mind closely matches how I think. At least it should be "(foo && bar) || baz". But even then, that only works when the actual return type is boolean and there are no state changes made. I don't really see how using an Optional type would remove the if(null) checks. It just makes the meaning explicit, which is good but not remedying the original problem. 5 seems nice.
- losvedir 10y ago
  > I don't really see how using an Optional type would remove the if(null) checks. It just makes the meaning explicit, which is good but not remedying the original problem. Yeah, the benefit is not really the Option (which you still have to check), the benefit is when there's no Option. I'm not really sold on there being a benefit in Java (looks like those are the code samples in the article?), but in languages where `null` is not a part of the type, and your parameter is just a plain, `int`, say, then you know you don't need to check if it's `null`. In other languages, you either have to always check, or rely on a convention or code flow that has the null checks happening earlier.
- wereHamster 10y ago
  > I don't really see how using an Optional type would remove the if(null) checks. It just makes the meaning explicit, which is good but not remedying the original problem. If you always use `Option` (or whatever equivalent your language/base library provides) and banish `null` from your source code you've effectively avoided all null pointer exceptions and can therefore remove all null checks.
akkartik 10y ago
This recent article seems relevant: http://www.sandimetz.com/blog/2016/6/9/make-everything-the-same http://www.sandimetz.com/blog/2016/6/9/make-everything-the-s...
- eyan 10y ago
  This is actually a better read than the OP. Thank you.
  - mercer 10y ago
    I only read bits and pieces of "Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby" by Sandi Metz, and the occasional article, but all of it has been surprisingly beneficial to my day to day coding.
a3n 10y ago
> Patten 3: NullObject/Optional over null passing The solution here disperses the responsibility of keeping sumOf safe to its callers, all over the place, instead of a single location in sumOf.
- peterevans 10y ago
  Agreed. The sumOf function is now made more brittle by that fact, and would be unworkably so in a publicly-available API. This is easily fixed by a try-catch block if one finds that they are indeed allergic to if statements, although that too is a form of flow control. If you are programming in Go, you're going to have to bite the bullet and use an if. (I suspect the author would prefer jumping in a lake over programming in Go.) I think it is also worth mentioning that passing a new ArrayList over a null value is somewhat wasteful of memory. Though the reference to ArrayList will cease to exist, its allocated memory will hang out until the next GC phase. In the words of Bartleby, I would prefer not to. I get the principle that is being advocated, but the solution code doesn't pass practical muster for me.
  - RodgerTheGreat 10y ago
    In this very specific instance, you could easily and idiomatically reuse a single instance of an immutable empty list: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/Collections.html#emptyList() https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/Collecti... No dynamic heap allocation necessary.
  - rejschaap 10y ago
    It is more brittle, sometimes the best you can do is to prefer empty collections over null. Some environments do offer a solution by using parameter annotations. Personally I do a lot of C# with resharper where you can add the [NotNull] attribute to a parameter, which enables some compile time checking.
skybrian 10y ago
Generally speaking, for every refactoring you could do, the opposite move is sometimes useful too. For example, inlining a function and extracting a helper function could both be a way to simplify code, depending on what you're trying to do. Similarly here, I think it's good to know how to get rid of an if statement, but keep in mind that sometimes you might want to introduce an if statement. Sometimes you want polymorphism and sometimes it's better to do the same thing as pattern matching.
dfox 10y ago
If you want extreme case of removing all ifs, see how ifTrue: and friends are implemented in Smalltalk (ie. true and false are instances of different classes), although essentially all compiler implementations turn that into normal conditional branches in generated bytecode.
- chriswarbo 10y ago
  Also, from the functional programming side, Church Booleans: function true(x, y) { return x; } function false(x, y) { return y; } There's an example of Church encoding used in anger at http://www.haskellforall.com/2016/04/data-is-code.html http://www.haskellforall.com/2016/04/data-is-code.html
- aaron-santos 10y ago
  I think I'm looking at an implementation of ifTrue[1], but it's a bit dense to someone who's not familiar with Smalltalk. Maybe you could walk me through it? [1] - http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=smalltalk.git;a=blob;f=packages/stinst/parser/STCompiler.st;hb=HEAD#l842 http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=smalltalk.git;a=blob;f...
  - dfox 10y ago
    That's the compiler part that optimizes the elegance away :). The interesting part is here [1], note that it will work without any support from the compiler. [1] - http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=smalltalk.git;a=blob;f=kernel/False.st;h=b1a85e58e6e90bc2034bf653d6276d12b8d1dae6;hb=HEAD http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=smalltalk.git;a=blob;f... and http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=smalltalk.git;a=blob;f=kernel/True.st;h=eab5d9b9f11c501598115916dc234f8f50580c1f;hb=HEAD http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=smalltalk.git;a=blob;f...
    - aaron-santos 10y ago
      Much more straight forward. If I'm reading it correctly, True and False are subclasses of Boolean and each of which implements a complementary pair of ifTrue and ifFalse methods? Elegantly symmetric. :)
xamuel 10y ago
I don't know what's so "Missing" about the polymorphism anti-if: I've seen it ruin plenty of code.
michaelmior 10y ago
One thing I've always done with if statements is when I have an if with a negated condition and no else case if (!condition) { // do stuff } When I want to add an else case, I swap the order so the condition is no longer negated. if (condition) { // do other stuff } else { // do stuff } To me it's easier to read a non-negated condition and the else case then feels more natural. (It avoids having to internally think about else case as "condition not not satisfied".)
- mercer 10y ago
  Interesting. I often (but not always) prefer the if (!condition) {} at the top because I see it as 'bailing out' of the function if conditions are not met.
  - michaelmior 10y ago
    If I'm doing an early return, I usually don't put the rest of the function inside the else case since I feel it creates an unnecessary level of indentation.
ankurdhama 10y ago
Getting rid of if/else is nothing but moving the if/else to somewhere else.
- rtpg 10y ago
  This is only true in a very technical sense. function getColor(str){ if(str=='blue'){ return '#0000ff'; } if(str=='red') { return '#ff0000'; } } getColor = { blue: '#0000ff', red: '#ffoooo' } The second one also has if statements inside the implementation of the hash map, but it isn't actually polluting your business logic. The question is no longer "what do you do when the input is like this or like that", but "lookup the corresponding output". The distinction is nice because I know that getColor[thing] will likely have no side effects. I can treat it, on a theoretical level, strictly as a map. Of course if the problem is "implement this on a machine without branching" this isn't super useful but most problems are not that.
  - ankurdhama 10y ago
    I agree. For example when you are using some form of polymorphism, the compiler/runtime are handling your if/else for you. But, still in terms of understanding what a piece of code is doing you will have to consider all the possible branches whether they are explicit in code as if/else statements or hidden under some abstraction like map/dictionary. Edit: The conditional abstractions like map are useful in the sense that the conditions that they support are very simple, in case of map it is if supplied key equals that key, whereas if/else statements can be used to create any kind of complex conditions.
Illniyar 10y ago
I like the addition of the "tolerance" bit to examples, more blogs should have a "when not to use" section.
userbinator 10y ago
I'm disappointed that of all the patterns presented, most of them actually increase the complexity to some extent, and none of them are the use of a lookup table/array. IMHO that is the "real anti-if pattern" here, and it can immensely simplify code. I've taken long, convoluted nested if/else chains with plenty of duplication and turned them into a single array lookup. A bonus is that performance and size often benefit as well, since the code is far less branchy. http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/42732/Table-driven-Approach http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/42732/Table-driven-Appro...
- cle 10y ago
  I do this a lot too. Often long chains of if statements are really performing a manual mapping from one set of values to another. Just keep a map and perform a lookup! Easier to read, easier to change, and easier to extend since the mapping is a data structure instead of code.
  - adrianratnapala 10y ago
    Efficiency-wise I agree, but if I don't care about efficiency then I often prefer an if-chain (or better still, a switch-case). The point is that the desired mapping is known not just at compile time, but is explicitly known to the programmer. So it is clearer if it right there in the executable code rather than hidden away in some moving part (the mapping data structure).
    - userbinator 10y ago
      switch-case is often compiled to a table lookup, but if your expressions are constant (at least for the part where the table is being used), the latter is definitely less verbose. So it is clearer if it right there in the executable code rather than hidden away in some moving part (the mapping data structure). Following several levels of nested if/else is "clearer" than going to the right array index? I don't know what you mean by "hidden away in some moving part".
      - 10y ago
jlg23 10y ago
Uhm. No, no, no, no and no. > [Pattern 1] Solution: Split the method into two new methods. Voilà, the if is gone. And so is parametrization. > [Pattern 2]: Solution: Use Polymorphism. Anyone introducing a new type cannot forget to add the associated behaviour. OTOH you make extensions more complex. I usually write in lisp and DO NOT use polymorphism for this but etypecase in the base implementation of a method (switch/case where the default case automatically throws an error). This allows people who extend my code to implemented a method specific to a type that my base implementation handles and thereby overriding my implementation with minimal effort. > [Pattern 3]: Solution: Use a NullObject or Optional type instead of ever passing a null. An empty collection is a great alternative. This is, IMHO, not relevant at all - the decision how null values are handled simply has to be documented so programmers can make an informed choice. The only exception I accept is an empty collection which I'll always prefer over null, assuming that all other code handles empty collections gracefully. > [Pattern 4]: Solution: Simplify the if statements into a single expression. Works for the contrived example (and we all know that the code is really bad). For more complex code I rather follow the logic line by line instead of mentally disassembling a 10 line boolean expression. > [Pattern 5]: Solution: Give the code being called a coping strategy. No, just no. One does not aim at removing exceptions. Those are to be handled by a higher layer who actually knows how to handle it. If one uses default values one still has to check on that layer with the added burden of using a default value that is guaranteed to never be returned as a real value so we can make the distinction between record found/record not found.
catnaroek 10y ago
All of the proposed solutions are deficient: > Pattern 1: Boolean Params This solution suffers from what we typeful programmers call “Boolean blindness”: https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/boolean-blindness/ https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/boolean-bli... . When you compute a bit, what you are actually interested in is the meaning of the bit, which isn't included in the bit itself. For example, if the bit is set, then “x” is less or equal than “y”; if it's unset, then “x” is greater than “y”. > Pattern 2: Switch to Polymorphism Dynamic dispatch (what the author wrongly calls “polymorphism”) can be used for open-ended case analysis. But it suffers from two drawbacks: (0) Unless you have multimethods, case-analyzing two or more values at the same time is a bitch! (1) Even if you do have multimethods, the open-ended nature of this whole business makes static exhaustiveness checking (making sure that no case is missing) impossible. > Patte[r]n 3: NullObject/Optional over null passing Null objects are still falling back to pattern 2, and optionals are severely underpowered in languages without pattern matching and compile-time exhaustiveness checks. For instance, one of my favorite patterns is implementing operations (say, “merge”) on non-empty collections, then extending them to possibly empty ones: (* pe = possibly empty *) datatype 'a pe = Empty | Cons of 'a (* extend a merge operation on non-empty collections * to possibly empty ones *) fun pointed _ (xs, Empty) = xs | pointed _ (Empty, ys) = ys | pointed op++ (Cons xs, Cons ys) = Cons (xs ++ ys) fun merge (xs, ys) = ... (* possibly complicated *) and mergePE args = pointed merge args How do Java-style optionals help? > Patte[r]n 4: Inline statements into expressions This only makes the problems associated to Boolean blindness even worse. > Pattern 5: Give a coping strategy What if there is no sensible default value? Just... no. --- What you really need is algebraic data types, pattern matching and exhaustiveness checks.
yildirim 10y ago
I had a professor in university who was frequently saying he developed a thousand application and he didn't use any if. I know it's extreme but is there any way to reduce (lets say 5 to 1) conditions? I think he was developing Fortran apps. Anecdote: This very same professor asked us to do a matrix operation (I don't remember what) without using if once. He said it would be faster than using ifs. Many of us couldn't. Then he revealed his solution, he was getting first indice of first row and doing some operation and getting the last indice of last row, then second indice of first row and so on. One of my friend told that if he wrote the algorithm plain using ifs, it would be faster. Professor told it's impossible. In the end of the day the version which was written using ifs was a lot faster than the version without ifs. Because of the changing indices cause a lot of cache misses but getting matrix elements sequentially used cache correctly.
- hvidgaard 10y ago
  The performance cost of ifs are not that bad. Especially if it means you can read sequentially from the memory. It however, do represent branching, and in a hotspot it can be more efficient to simply calculate both the if and the else and just choose the right value, rather than having a branch misprediction. In any case, always profile, and identify issues before doing any optimization.
- bluetomcat 10y ago
  Programs with lots of deep branches are generally not well thought out and prone to bugs. In my view, every branch represents an "exception" to the main execution path. The explosion of combinations of taken/not taken branches is what brings your program to an unpredictable state. The performance side is debatable, but with fewer branches a program is definitely simpler and more elegant.
praptak 10y ago
Using 'if' indicates programmer's doubts about what a program should do. These are usually rooted in low self esteem and troubled relationships with parents.
- ehnto 10y ago
  if (myParentsLoveMe) selfWorth++;
mikkom 10y ago
All these complicated examples and no mention of functional pattern matching or pattern matching at all. IMHO These are by far the two most important ways to get rid of complex code embedded with ifs. One very good example of this is erlangs factorial method. factorial(0) -> 1; factorial(N) -> N * factorial(N-1). There are many other nice examples at the erlang documentation: https://www.erlang.org/course/sequential-programming#funcsyntax https://www.erlang.org/course/sequential-programming#funcsyn...
- majewsky 10y ago
  True functional-style pattern matching is only slowly coming into imperative languages right now, most prominently in Rust.
- chriswarbo 10y ago
  Unfortunately, pattern matching isn't available in many languages (or at least, including a new dependency for the sake of removing `if`s may not be worth it). On the other hand, the article recommends using sub-type polymorphism, which is also unavailable in many languages.
salex89 10y ago
And if there is no record in the repository, what should I do with the default value? Check if the returned value is different from the default? I actually don't see any real benefit in cleanliness. The only thing that could actually happen is using the default in some way that could eventually bring the data in some strange state. An NPE would at least shout "YOU MESSED SOMETHING UP" in my face.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
duke360 10y ago
I'm quite supportive to the anti-if pattern but the presented example sounds me more like "code smells" and doesn't really makes me happy to me anti-if is a great winner when you can safely compute all the execution path in advance (in a way where you have not to nest ifs, of course!) but in situations where your code have to react to something that happens "on the moment"... well, probably "if" are more convenient (not always of course) anyway thanks to have raised the point, this topic is always interesting to me
zimbatm 10y ago
The first "anti-if" should be to resist adding unnecessary features, on every level. The less branches, the less possible ways to fail.
amelius 10y ago
I was hoping for some examples that reduce costs incurred by failing branch-prediction in the CPU.
glastra 10y ago
Pattern 5 is all about removing semantic value from null references, but has nothing to do with if statements... In fact, the if-else remains (albeit hidden because of an early return inside an if, which is even worse in my opinion).

130 points by joejag 10y ago

jduv 10y ago

I'm surprised there was no mention of the Specification pattern. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specification_pattern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specification_pattern

daveguy 10y ago
My god what an abomination of programming simplicity. Do people actually write code like this? It's as if someone said you must use interfaces and you must use objects for even the simplest boolean logic statement. I think I would claw my eyes out if I had to read and write code like this on a regular basis.

wtetzner 10y ago

> Context: You have a method that takes a boolean which alters its behaviour > Problem: Any time you see this you actually have two methods bundled into one. That boolean represents an opportunity to name a concept in your code. This is only true if you're using literal booleans at you call sites. If the booleans are coming from somewhere else, like user input, you just moved your single if statement in the method out to every call site. > Context: You are calling some other code, but you aren’t sure if the happy path will suceceed. > Problem: These sort of if statements multiply each time you deal with the same object or data structure. They have a hidden coupling where ‘null’ means someting. Other objects may return other magic values that mean no result. Passing a default value works, but in Java 8, returning an Optional is cleaner. And if you wanted a default value, you can still do repository.getRecord(123).orElse("Not found"); Edit: Also, the coping strategy link [1] he gave to remove exceptions sounds a lot like restarts in Commons Lisp's condition system. [1] https://silkandspinach.net/2014/11/06/on-paperboys-newsagents-and-exceptions/ https://silkandspinach.net/2014/11/06/on-paperboys-newsagent...

ktRolster 10y ago
This is why I never try to give prescriptions on code style.....whenever I think I have something good, someone else comes along with something better. And when I see someone else's advice, I can think of something better. And after I finish writing my own code, I can always look at it and think, "Oh, I could have done that better." See also: efficiency. There's always a way to make it more efficient.
rtpg 10y ago
I think if your boolean is coming from user input then refactoring your method to accept user input, and then wrapping your method with a helper function that does the user input call would still be good advice. At some point applying "anti-if" does involve major refactoring, so the outer style of your code might need to change a bit. Of course like all design patterns it's more of a thought experiment than a total prescription IMO. But taking the thought experiment to its logical conclusion can also yield interesting results. Some people might throw out strawman arguments about design patterns, but I'll end up reading the strawman and be like " yeah that does sound like a good idea". It's pretty hard to overestimate the value of regularity in code.
kazinator 10y ago
Common Lisp to the rescue! (defmethod make-sound ((b bear) (loud-p t))) ;; bear makes loud sound ...) (defmethod make-sound ((b bear) (loud-p null)) ;; bear makes quiet sound ...) If we call (make-sound bear-instance nil), the second method is invoked because loud-p is specialized to the null class, whose only instance is nil. (There is a type nil also, whose domain is the empty set: it has no instance.) If we call (make-sound bear-instance <any other value>), then the first specialization takes over. It's specialize to T, the grand superclass, so it is a fallback that takes anything. Any value other than nil serves as a Boolean true in Lisp. It's a magic of Lisp that T stands for "any type" as well as "true". :) I don't know whether treating Booleans as method parameters like this is good design, but I don't see any immediate down sides.
- rtpg 10y ago
  Are the semantics to this comparable to Haskell's pattern matching on function arguments?

keenerd 10y ago

This reminds me of something I read on HN a while back and forgot to bookmark. (Naturally I've been unable to find it since.) I think the article was written by a company who made a static code analysis tool. They described how there wasn't a large difference in quality between FOSS and proprietary code, except for one detail: FOSS code used "else" statements much less. Anyone have any idea what I'm thinking of or if I'm even remembering it correctly?

majewsky 10y ago
Did you try http://hn.algolia.com http://hn.algolia.com ?
douche 10y ago
That does sound familiar. Was it possibly from either the NDepend blog, or more likely, the PVS-Studio blog?

efraim 10y ago

Misko Hevery did a Google Tech Talk about this some years ago, he also use a very similar example with switching on the birds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F72VULWFvc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F72VULWFvc

simonhorlick 10y ago
This. If there's anything that's made me a better programmer it's Misko's talks.

predavlad 10y ago

Good luck doing that in a production environment, and not while "theorycrafting". You have waaaay too much free time.

dang 10y ago
Please keep snark and personal swipes off HN.

tgb 10y ago

I'm afraid the article has left me unconvinced. I'm open to having my mind changed on the matter, though. The point of passing boolean params instead of named functions is that most of the time there is shared code between the two paths and not literally all the code is enclosed in either the if or the else block. If the author was intending just to restrict to that one specific case where there was no overlap whatsoever, then I guess I would agree but I'm not sure how often that happens. Polymorphism has some advantages but it's certainly got it's own troubles in terms of understand-ability. The author links to an article which even states "I think that we hate conditionals more than we should. Introducing polymorphism too soon will complicate your code, making it hard to understand and test." It then goes on to give an example where it says polymorphism is actually the right choice, to avoid two switches. I'd say that at least this trivial example would be best handled by some data-driven approach. Look up salaries in a database instead. The inline statement one can certainly be better in some cases, but the example given is quite poor. What does "foo && bar || baz" mean? Well, now I have to remember the order of operations ... 'or' after 'and' I guess. Surely this is easier to misread than the if statement example, which in my mind closely matches how I think. At least it should be "(foo && bar) || baz". But even then, that only works when the actual return type is boolean and there are no state changes made. I don't really see how using an Optional type would remove the if(null) checks. It just makes the meaning explicit, which is good but not remedying the original problem. 5 seems nice.

losvedir 10y ago
> I don't really see how using an Optional type would remove the if(null) checks. It just makes the meaning explicit, which is good but not remedying the original problem. Yeah, the benefit is not really the Option (which you still have to check), the benefit is when there's no Option. I'm not really sold on there being a benefit in Java (looks like those are the code samples in the article?), but in languages where `null` is not a part of the type, and your parameter is just a plain, `int`, say, then you know you don't need to check if it's `null`. In other languages, you either have to always check, or rely on a convention or code flow that has the null checks happening earlier.
wereHamster 10y ago
> I don't really see how using an Optional type would remove the if(null) checks. It just makes the meaning explicit, which is good but not remedying the original problem. If you always use `Option` (or whatever equivalent your language/base library provides) and banish `null` from your source code you've effectively avoided all null pointer exceptions and can therefore remove all null checks.

akkartik 10y ago

This recent article seems relevant: http://www.sandimetz.com/blog/2016/6/9/make-everything-the-same http://www.sandimetz.com/blog/2016/6/9/make-everything-the-s...

eyan 10y ago
This is actually a better read than the OP. Thank you.
- mercer 10y ago
  I only read bits and pieces of "Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby" by Sandi Metz, and the occasional article, but all of it has been surprisingly beneficial to my day to day coding.

a3n 10y ago

> Patten 3: NullObject/Optional over null passing The solution here disperses the responsibility of keeping sumOf safe to its callers, all over the place, instead of a single location in sumOf.

peterevans 10y ago
Agreed. The sumOf function is now made more brittle by that fact, and would be unworkably so in a publicly-available API. This is easily fixed by a try-catch block if one finds that they are indeed allergic to if statements, although that too is a form of flow control. If you are programming in Go, you're going to have to bite the bullet and use an if. (I suspect the author would prefer jumping in a lake over programming in Go.) I think it is also worth mentioning that passing a new ArrayList over a null value is somewhat wasteful of memory. Though the reference to ArrayList will cease to exist, its allocated memory will hang out until the next GC phase. In the words of Bartleby, I would prefer not to. I get the principle that is being advocated, but the solution code doesn't pass practical muster for me.
- RodgerTheGreat 10y ago
  In this very specific instance, you could easily and idiomatically reuse a single instance of an immutable empty list: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/Collections.html#emptyList() https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/Collecti... No dynamic heap allocation necessary.
- rejschaap 10y ago
  It is more brittle, sometimes the best you can do is to prefer empty collections over null. Some environments do offer a solution by using parameter annotations. Personally I do a lot of C# with resharper where you can add the [NotNull] attribute to a parameter, which enables some compile time checking.

skybrian 10y ago

Generally speaking, for every refactoring you could do, the opposite move is sometimes useful too. For example, inlining a function and extracting a helper function could both be a way to simplify code, depending on what you're trying to do. Similarly here, I think it's good to know how to get rid of an if statement, but keep in mind that sometimes you might want to introduce an if statement. Sometimes you want polymorphism and sometimes it's better to do the same thing as pattern matching.

dfox 10y ago

If you want extreme case of removing all ifs, see how ifTrue: and friends are implemented in Smalltalk (ie. true and false are instances of different classes), although essentially all compiler implementations turn that into normal conditional branches in generated bytecode.

chriswarbo 10y ago
Also, from the functional programming side, Church Booleans: function true(x, y) { return x; } function false(x, y) { return y; } There's an example of Church encoding used in anger at http://www.haskellforall.com/2016/04/data-is-code.html http://www.haskellforall.com/2016/04/data-is-code.html
aaron-santos 10y ago
I think I'm looking at an implementation of ifTrue[1], but it's a bit dense to someone who's not familiar with Smalltalk. Maybe you could walk me through it? [1] - http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=smalltalk.git;a=blob;f=packages/stinst/parser/STCompiler.st;hb=HEAD#l842 http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=smalltalk.git;a=blob;f...
- dfox 10y ago
  That's the compiler part that optimizes the elegance away :). The interesting part is here [1], note that it will work without any support from the compiler. [1] - http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=smalltalk.git;a=blob;f=kernel/False.st;h=b1a85e58e6e90bc2034bf653d6276d12b8d1dae6;hb=HEAD http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=smalltalk.git;a=blob;f... and http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=smalltalk.git;a=blob;f=kernel/True.st;h=eab5d9b9f11c501598115916dc234f8f50580c1f;hb=HEAD http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=smalltalk.git;a=blob;f...
  - aaron-santos 10y ago
    Much more straight forward. If I'm reading it correctly, True and False are subclasses of Boolean and each of which implements a complementary pair of ifTrue and ifFalse methods? Elegantly symmetric. :)

xamuel 10y ago

I don't know what's so "Missing" about the polymorphism anti-if: I've seen it ruin plenty of code.

michaelmior 10y ago

One thing I've always done with if statements is when I have an if with a negated condition and no else case if (!condition) { // do stuff } When I want to add an else case, I swap the order so the condition is no longer negated. if (condition) { // do other stuff } else { // do stuff } To me it's easier to read a non-negated condition and the else case then feels more natural. (It avoids having to internally think about else case as "condition not not satisfied".)

mercer 10y ago
Interesting. I often (but not always) prefer the if (!condition) {} at the top because I see it as 'bailing out' of the function if conditions are not met.
- michaelmior 10y ago
  If I'm doing an early return, I usually don't put the rest of the function inside the else case since I feel it creates an unnecessary level of indentation.

ankurdhama 10y ago

Getting rid of if/else is nothing but moving the if/else to somewhere else.

rtpg 10y ago
This is only true in a very technical sense. function getColor(str){ if(str=='blue'){ return '#0000ff'; } if(str=='red') { return '#ff0000'; } } getColor = { blue: '#0000ff', red: '#ffoooo' } The second one also has if statements inside the implementation of the hash map, but it isn't actually polluting your business logic. The question is no longer "what do you do when the input is like this or like that", but "lookup the corresponding output". The distinction is nice because I know that getColor[thing] will likely have no side effects. I can treat it, on a theoretical level, strictly as a map. Of course if the problem is "implement this on a machine without branching" this isn't super useful but most problems are not that.
- ankurdhama 10y ago
  I agree. For example when you are using some form of polymorphism, the compiler/runtime are handling your if/else for you. But, still in terms of understanding what a piece of code is doing you will have to consider all the possible branches whether they are explicit in code as if/else statements or hidden under some abstraction like map/dictionary. Edit: The conditional abstractions like map are useful in the sense that the conditions that they support are very simple, in case of map it is if supplied key equals that key, whereas if/else statements can be used to create any kind of complex conditions.

Illniyar 10y ago

I like the addition of the "tolerance" bit to examples, more blogs should have a "when not to use" section.

userbinator 10y ago

I'm disappointed that of all the patterns presented, most of them actually increase the complexity to some extent, and none of them are the use of a lookup table/array. IMHO that is the "real anti-if pattern" here, and it can immensely simplify code. I've taken long, convoluted nested if/else chains with plenty of duplication and turned them into a single array lookup. A bonus is that performance and size often benefit as well, since the code is far less branchy. http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/42732/Table-driven-Approach http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/42732/Table-driven-Appro...

cle 10y ago
I do this a lot too. Often long chains of if statements are really performing a manual mapping from one set of values to another. Just keep a map and perform a lookup! Easier to read, easier to change, and easier to extend since the mapping is a data structure instead of code.
- adrianratnapala 10y ago
  Efficiency-wise I agree, but if I don't care about efficiency then I often prefer an if-chain (or better still, a switch-case). The point is that the desired mapping is known not just at compile time, but is explicitly known to the programmer. So it is clearer if it right there in the executable code rather than hidden away in some moving part (the mapping data structure).
  - userbinator 10y ago
    switch-case is often compiled to a table lookup, but if your expressions are constant (at least for the part where the table is being used), the latter is definitely less verbose. So it is clearer if it right there in the executable code rather than hidden away in some moving part (the mapping data structure). Following several levels of nested if/else is "clearer" than going to the right array index? I don't know what you mean by "hidden away in some moving part".
    - 10y ago

jlg23 10y ago

Uhm. No, no, no, no and no. > [Pattern 1] Solution: Split the method into two new methods. Voilà, the if is gone. And so is parametrization. > [Pattern 2]: Solution: Use Polymorphism. Anyone introducing a new type cannot forget to add the associated behaviour. OTOH you make extensions more complex. I usually write in lisp and DO NOT use polymorphism for this but etypecase in the base implementation of a method (switch/case where the default case automatically throws an error). This allows people who extend my code to implemented a method specific to a type that my base implementation handles and thereby overriding my implementation with minimal effort. > [Pattern 3]: Solution: Use a NullObject or Optional type instead of ever passing a null. An empty collection is a great alternative. This is, IMHO, not relevant at all - the decision how null values are handled simply has to be documented so programmers can make an informed choice. The only exception I accept is an empty collection which I'll always prefer over null, assuming that all other code handles empty collections gracefully. > [Pattern 4]: Solution: Simplify the if statements into a single expression. Works for the contrived example (and we all know that the code is really bad). For more complex code I rather follow the logic line by line instead of mentally disassembling a 10 line boolean expression. > [Pattern 5]: Solution: Give the code being called a coping strategy. No, just no. One does not aim at removing exceptions. Those are to be handled by a higher layer who actually knows how to handle it. If one uses default values one still has to check on that layer with the added burden of using a default value that is guaranteed to never be returned as a real value so we can make the distinction between record found/record not found.

catnaroek 10y ago

All of the proposed solutions are deficient: > Pattern 1: Boolean Params This solution suffers from what we typeful programmers call “Boolean blindness”: https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/boolean-blindness/ https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/boolean-bli... . When you compute a bit, what you are actually interested in is the meaning of the bit, which isn't included in the bit itself. For example, if the bit is set, then “x” is less or equal than “y”; if it's unset, then “x” is greater than “y”. > Pattern 2: Switch to Polymorphism Dynamic dispatch (what the author wrongly calls “polymorphism”) can be used for open-ended case analysis. But it suffers from two drawbacks: (0) Unless you have multimethods, case-analyzing two or more values at the same time is a bitch! (1) Even if you do have multimethods, the open-ended nature of this whole business makes static exhaustiveness checking (making sure that no case is missing) impossible. > Patte[r]n 3: NullObject/Optional over null passing Null objects are still falling back to pattern 2, and optionals are severely underpowered in languages without pattern matching and compile-time exhaustiveness checks. For instance, one of my favorite patterns is implementing operations (say, “merge”) on non-empty collections, then extending them to possibly empty ones: (* pe = possibly empty *) datatype 'a pe = Empty | Cons of 'a (* extend a merge operation on non-empty collections * to possibly empty ones *) fun pointed _ (xs, Empty) = xs | pointed _ (Empty, ys) = ys | pointed op++ (Cons xs, Cons ys) = Cons (xs ++ ys) fun merge (xs, ys) = ... (* possibly complicated *) and mergePE args = pointed merge args How do Java-style optionals help? > Patte[r]n 4: Inline statements into expressions This only makes the problems associated to Boolean blindness even worse. > Pattern 5: Give a coping strategy What if there is no sensible default value? Just... no. --- What you really need is algebraic data types, pattern matching and exhaustiveness checks.

yildirim 10y ago

I had a professor in university who was frequently saying he developed a thousand application and he didn't use any if. I know it's extreme but is there any way to reduce (lets say 5 to 1) conditions? I think he was developing Fortran apps. Anecdote: This very same professor asked us to do a matrix operation (I don't remember what) without using if once. He said it would be faster than using ifs. Many of us couldn't. Then he revealed his solution, he was getting first indice of first row and doing some operation and getting the last indice of last row, then second indice of first row and so on. One of my friend told that if he wrote the algorithm plain using ifs, it would be faster. Professor told it's impossible. In the end of the day the version which was written using ifs was a lot faster than the version without ifs. Because of the changing indices cause a lot of cache misses but getting matrix elements sequentially used cache correctly.

hvidgaard 10y ago
The performance cost of ifs are not that bad. Especially if it means you can read sequentially from the memory. It however, do represent branching, and in a hotspot it can be more efficient to simply calculate both the if and the else and just choose the right value, rather than having a branch misprediction. In any case, always profile, and identify issues before doing any optimization.
bluetomcat 10y ago
Programs with lots of deep branches are generally not well thought out and prone to bugs. In my view, every branch represents an "exception" to the main execution path. The explosion of combinations of taken/not taken branches is what brings your program to an unpredictable state. The performance side is debatable, but with fewer branches a program is definitely simpler and more elegant.

praptak 10y ago

Using 'if' indicates programmer's doubts about what a program should do. These are usually rooted in low self esteem and troubled relationships with parents.

ehnto 10y ago
if (myParentsLoveMe) selfWorth++;

mikkom 10y ago

All these complicated examples and no mention of functional pattern matching or pattern matching at all. IMHO These are by far the two most important ways to get rid of complex code embedded with ifs. One very good example of this is erlangs factorial method. factorial(0) -> 1; factorial(N) -> N * factorial(N-1). There are many other nice examples at the erlang documentation: https://www.erlang.org/course/sequential-programming#funcsyntax https://www.erlang.org/course/sequential-programming#funcsyn...

majewsky 10y ago
True functional-style pattern matching is only slowly coming into imperative languages right now, most prominently in Rust.
chriswarbo 10y ago
Unfortunately, pattern matching isn't available in many languages (or at least, including a new dependency for the sake of removing `if`s may not be worth it). On the other hand, the article recommends using sub-type polymorphism, which is also unavailable in many languages.

salex89 10y ago

And if there is no record in the repository, what should I do with the default value? Check if the returned value is different from the default? I actually don't see any real benefit in cleanliness. The only thing that could actually happen is using the default in some way that could eventually bring the data in some strange state. An NPE would at least shout "YOU MESSED SOMETHING UP" in my face.

deleted 10y ago

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duke360 10y ago

I'm quite supportive to the anti-if pattern but the presented example sounds me more like "code smells" and doesn't really makes me happy to me anti-if is a great winner when you can safely compute all the execution path in advance (in a way where you have not to nest ifs, of course!) but in situations where your code have to react to something that happens "on the moment"... well, probably "if" are more convenient (not always of course) anyway thanks to have raised the point, this topic is always interesting to me

zimbatm 10y ago

The first "anti-if" should be to resist adding unnecessary features, on every level. The less branches, the less possible ways to fail.

amelius 10y ago

I was hoping for some examples that reduce costs incurred by failing branch-prediction in the CPU.

glastra 10y ago

Pattern 5 is all about removing semantic value from null references, but has nothing to do with if statements... In fact, the if-else remains (albeit hidden because of an early return inside an if, which is even worse in my opinion).