It is time to unlink the “Backspace” – Browser Back shortcut (2012)

Re:It is time to unlink the “Backspace” – Browser Back short... by revelation on Saturday August 20, 2016 @06:57PM (#12328643)

If you are going to argue this, you might just as well start arguing that no programmer is allowed more than a quota of 10 ifs per month. Every conditional branch in your program is "an opportunity for bugs and an opportunity for misconfiguration".

This is the equivalent of hoisting a white flag. Theres tons of code added to Chrome all the time, it doesn't add configuration options but it sure as hell has the very same effect.

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Re:It is time to unlink the “Backspace” – Browser Back short... by geofft on Saturday August 20, 2016 @07:13PM (#12328695)

An if is just an inconsistent goto, so, yes. if is often a code smell.

For instance, any code like

    x = some_result()
    if is_valid(x):
        do_stuff_with(x)

is indisputably an opportunity for bugs. Better would be some construct like "if let" in Swift or Rust, where you can't use x without the condition. For instance, this was the fundamental cause of Apple's "goto fail" vulnerability: the language / API style required that they check each result and run a conditional branch on their own. (The proximate cause was bad language syntax, but the opportunity for bad syntax shouldn't have been there in the first place.)

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