Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

Re:Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or wors... by devchix on Saturday May 15, 2021 @10:23AM (#27165491)

I appreciate this. I think one of the more valuable advice I was given re:conditionals is to make sure the positive path is the non-branching path. Branch your exception, let your expected path fall through.

    if ( unexpected = true )
      branch;
    do_expected_stuff

Caveat: ways to do things age. Maybe this is no longer true or even slightly advantageous, but so far it has served me.

I also prefer 20 lines of simple pedestrian code to 2 lines of clever code. I remind myself that I write for the maintainers, who do not have the benefit of my resident knowledge when they encounter the code.

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Re:Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or wors... by Schwolop on Monday May 17, 2021 @10:02PM (#27190550)

I learnt this one early on and definitely still encourage it (but aware of your caveat too). But I describe it differently when I'm coaching, and I think I've used the phrase "try to get your conditionals out of the way early".

My rationale is that having done this, I'm left with a smaller combinatoric mental space to work within. Like "if the program counter has reached this point then I know for a fact that X, Y, and Z don't apply - the function would have exited early if they did". And that then means the remaining set of things I have to keep in my working memory is reduced, which makes life easier.

Is that similar to how you see this advice?

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Re:Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or wors... by Izkata on Sunday May 16, 2021 @04:35AM (#27172183)

This particular use of an if statement is subset of what's called a "guard clause", and I'm also a major fan of them. Other guards include an early return for edge cases or that would make the more general path more complicated, rather than just exceptions.

https://wiki.c2.com/?GuardClause/

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Re:Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or wors... by gabssnake on Saturday May 22, 2021 @04:08AM (#27244551)

aren't these ill defined guards?

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