To anyone out there who clicked through to these comments and is thinking it's not worth reading the article, please go ahead and read it. It's short enough. You may or may not use fewer if-statements in the future, but it might give you a better sense of why you choose to do things one way over another.

I've seen junior devs take this kind of stuff literally and over-apply it, like it's a religious ritual that they get a pious buzz from adhering to. I'd prefer people to think first before regurgitating what they most recently learned.

I'm trying to be charitable, though, so let's assume that the core of their idea is something coherent. I'm guessing it's really about something I do think is an important point: How inversion of control is a design pattern that lets you create code that's much easier to manage, because it greatly limits the extent to which certain kinds of decisions need to be federated throughout the codebase.

If that's the case, then real sin (and the article author's) is mistaking if statements for the problem. Conditional branching is not a problem; I think most of us can agree it's an essential operation. The real problem they should be after is poor encapsulation. Where if statements come into it is that, if you've got badly architected code with poor encapsulation, one of the symptoms you'll see is that there will be a proliferation of if-statements that crop up all throughout the code. Every single frobinator will need to stop and check whether the widget it's operating on is a whosit or a whatsit before it can take any sort of action whatsoever. Lord help us if we ever try to introduce wheresits into the system; we'll have to go modify 50 different files so we can replace all those if-statements with switch statements.

It's probably nowhere near as fun to write an article that advocates a high level design methodology as it is to write an article that makes a bold contrarian claim like "If statements bad", though.

As an example, long if/else chains that check state can mean that you need another object, or another virtual function, or some other niblet of orchestration.

Likewise, I'm not really impressed by the anti-if campaign. At some point, abstractions cause the exact same problem they were designed to solve, and produce code that is difficult to reason about or change.

But that sentence is "I’m just joking about the Anti-IF campaign". Why would extra words help?

Here's another website called "Destroy All Software" using a similar phrase: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/blog

Gary Bernhardt obviously doesn't advocate removing all software from the face of the Earth. Also notice that it includes blog titles with more bombastic titles:

  "One Base Class to Rule Them All"
  "Burn Your Controllers"

Likewise, don't eliminate your controllers because he said it's universal advice. Maybe the title is a riff on Cortez "burn your ships" or some other cultural meme like women's liberation of "burn your bra."

As a community we should reward more nuanced and open statements.

Simply replacing "ifs" with anything else.

I think it's clear how this is simply juvenile hyperbolic invective.

I notice this form of dismissal in virtually all internet arguments. It's like most people aren't aware of the difference between a strong argument and a sound argument.