4 ms·

Many years ago I worked on a project that had a hard “no hard coded values” rule, as requested by the customer. The team routinely wrote the equivalent to

by pdpi 5y ago

Many years ago I worked on a project that had a hard “no hard coded values” rule, as requested by the customer. The team routinely wrote the equivalent to const char_a = “a”; And I couldn’t get my manager to understand why this was a problem.

jandrese 5y ago
Clearly it is still a hardcoded value! It fails the requirement. Instead there should be a factory that loads a file that reads in the "a" to the variable, nested down under 6 layers of abstraction spread across a dozen files.
- mkoryak 5y ago
  thats too enterprisey, at a startup you would write it like this: const charA = (false+"")[1];
  - bosswipe 5y ago
    That has three constants.
    - mkoryak 5y ago
      is this better? const charA = (![]+[])[+!+[]];
      - pdpi 5y ago
        [] is still a constant.
        mkoryak 5y ago
        True, but we can both agree that this is a better constant than "a". Much better job security in that code.. unless you get fired for writing it, that is
      - mkehrt 5y ago
        I cannot even parse this. What is going on here?
taeric 5y ago
Saw this just the other day. I was at a loss to know what to say. :(
ebiester 5y ago
This gets to intent. What, in the code base, does char_a mean? Is it append_command? Is it used in a..z for all lowercase? Maybe an all_lowercase is needed instead. I know that it's an "A". I don't know why that matters to the codebase. Now, there are cases where it is obvious to even beginners, and I'm fine with it as magic characters, but I've seen cases where people were confused to why 1000 was in a `for(int i = 0; i<1000; i++)`. Is 1000 arbitrary in that case, or is it based on a defunct business requirement in 2008? Will it break if we change it to 5000 because our computers are faster now?