> Space shuttle style is meant to ensure that every branch and condition is considered and accounted for I thought this was what you were supposed to do. Not t

> Space shuttle style is meant to ensure that every branch and condition is considered and accounted for I thought this was what you were supposed to do. Not that I do it every time, because I'm lazy, but Zed Shaw used to say every `if` conditional should have a corresponding `else` (which can also take the form of guard clauses). In Ruby, this is really easy to do because every method has to return something, so you build "returning nil or some String" as a concept into your program. There's a whole discussion around whether _that_ is a good idea, but I digress...going through the motions of enumerating every possible condition for a given piece of logic is not a bad exercise, and can result in very robust code at the expense of the code looking a bit more confusing than necessary. We have a very similarly-written piece of code to this in our eCommerce platform. This code, written in Ruby, is used to calculate prices of discounts with regards to discount compatibility. There's a big warning atop the method stating something like "Please don't decorate/override this unless you ABSOLUTELY need to, the consequences could be very difficult to debug!". Not the easiest piece of code to look at, but it gets the job done in an efficient way without having to rely on C extensions for performance. We were also focused on correctness here, because calculating the wrong discount group could result in zero or even negative order totals, which our clients would _not_ be happy about. So the code is very verbosely written, isn't optimized for legibility, and strictly specifies both if and else sides of each conditional.