use Perl

• Code smell heuristic (Score:2)

  by jdavidb (1361)

  conditional checks in OO code prove themselves to be code smells.

  Thanks for the heuristic! I never realized that before! I think this will help improve my coding.

  (If there's a larger source where you picked that up, I'd be benefitted by a pointer.)

  --
  J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
  • Re: (Score:2)

    by Ovid (2709)

    I figured a concrete example would help. Imagine this awful method from some Catalyst code I was working on:

    sub _set_group_by : Private {
        my ( $self, $c ) = @_;
        my $group_by = 'day';
        my $period = $c->stash->{report_metadata}{period};
    
        my $report_range
                = $c->stash->{report_metadata}{start}->day_month_year
                . ' – '
             
    • Re:Code smell heuristic (Score:1)

      by theguvnor (1723) on 2008.04.29 15:34 (#62477)

      Thanks for the example, but I'm still confused... take pity on this dim one, and explain why the conditional check hasn't just moved elsewhere in your code where you decide which method to call? Or is that the entire point?

      Reply to This

      Parent

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Ovid (2709)

        In this case, it's done via a customer selecting a URL, so it's up to the customer to decide what they want and we don't have to.

        A better example would be with Java:

        public void setName(String name) {
            this.name = name;
        }
        
        public void setName(String first, String last) {
            this.name = first + " " + last;
        }

        In regular Perl (no modules), it sometimes gets mistakenly rewritten as this:

        sub name {
            my ( $self, $first, $last ) = @_;
            $self->{name} = $last ? "$