avoid negated conditions in if-else blocks


If you are looking for performance improvements a simple negation is not the thing you want to hunt down.

Having an empty if can be weird, especially if it's the type of if that doesn't need an else, so writing all that rather than a ! Laymen's description of "modals" to clients. The reason for that guideline to prefer positive if conditions is that code should be clear and obvious.

Granted, this is the method that contains the mutable mf value, so thats a contributing factor well need two isPresent checks because we try getting the value twice. I still dont like how many parameters this method has, but well look into that later.

Unless blocks should avoid having a negated condition. Jak zwikszy FPS W CS GO? Zosta lepszym graczem. There is no hard and fast rule about positive or negative conditions for an IF statement, not to my knowledge.

to wrap your head around a block of code that is executed if a negated I am used to early returns using the return keyword many languages provide. You found me for a reason. @cmaster -- That shouting is not a good idea is.

@TasosPapastylianou That's cheating.

That would, however, preclude an empty else block.

I have an acquaintance, a more seasoned developer than me. How should we do boxplots with small samples? Its not at all obvious from the code (and theres certainly no magic refactoring in IntelliJ IDEA) how to fix this problem.

Many simple ternary operator and one if-else, which one should I use? This is long term habit from languages that will error if such a clause is not used, and forces a thought as to whether things really should just drop through. Developer insists if statements shouldn't have negated conditions, and should always have an else block. Short story about the creation of a spell that creates a copy of a specific woman. Your digging led you this far, but let me prove my worth and ask for references! It leads to more confusion "Were there some statements planned and they forgot or why is there an empty clause?" You can pattern match the handle_command function to drop the first if, For the second if I would drop the call to Message.has/1 (assuming Message.get/1 returns nil for no message), Then have a function deal with the presence or lack of message, Keep going by creating functions that handle each situation and try to come up with names that reveal the intent of each step (do_send_message is a terrible function name but because naming is hard, you get to solve that ), (do_send_message is a terrible function name but because naming is hard, you get to solve that ). Join the DZone community and get the full member experience.

Its also just nice to deal with the exceptional case at the end. Here we actually need to either go into depth digging through the code, or apply some domain knowledge.

@Nikita 100,000 iterations don't take 230 ms, let alone show a difference that big. Is a neuron's information processing more complex than a perceptron?

It is easier to wrap. The second statement is in the context that only partial knowledge of a ternary state may be sufficient for an application to correctly work. Because 1) we see at a glance at most one of these branches will be executed now its an if/else 2) weve cut out one of the three isPresent checks so we dont have to keep reasoning about what it means if its not present 3) by working with the positive value (isPresent, rather than !isPresent) first its actually easier for humans to process. The for loop itself will make sure dont go past the end of the array. But when do you know when youve found everything you NEED? @DavidHammen No, shouting is not a good idea: If you have a //fallthrough in place of an expected break;, that should be enough for any developer to understand immediately. (complex || (boolean && condition))) do_that; else do_this;.

I dont mean if statements are evil never use them. Are you sure youre using the best strategy to net more and decrease stress? Development should handle this problem before they start coding. I want to move the guard condition on clazz right to the beginning, outside of the first if. As such, if you enforce a no-negatives rule, you enforce either having if() {} else {} statements (with an empty if block! Firstly, we can move the check for interface right to the top.

In the above example raising the error in case something is not allowed, might seem so important to put it first. It is still a lot more procedural than I like, and new developers to the code will probably still wonder exactly whats going on, but the method now fits onto a single laptop screen (just!) Remember that these rules apply only when you are writing new code. The presence of the return statement makes things worse. Is it possible your coworker comes from a background where life and limb might be at stake?

I would second the stand of most answers that empty else blocks are virtually always a harmful waste of electronic ink. In coming back to your question I would support verbiage that matches the origin of the information that the variable represents. Today, Im talking about if statements (conditionals). He insists on some practices regarding if statements that I find rather strange. However, while your colleague's rule would make it more difficult to misread the code, an easier solution would be to simply add a newline. Sure, these days you can find anything you want online with just the click of a button. I am pretty sure that this can be way improved - whats the proper design pattern for that in Elixir, how do I escape the if-block hell? This restricted use of goto is the preferred practice in some places. Something like this, Agreed. Where developers & technologists share private knowledge with coworkers, Reach developers & technologists worldwide. Sure, if you were using, @CodyGray -- This is one place where SHOUTING is a good idea. Are propositional atoms recoverable from this Boolean algebra structure? Both options are bad, as they confuse your readers. Now if new terms simplify the model, then that's important, but that should be handled before the requirements are finalized, not after. I did this because I wanted to be able to simplify the conditions inside that method too. The differences are: Published at DZone with permission of Trisha Gee, DZone MVB. Then again, I'm a big fan of refactoring whenever possible :).

That means that it's better to test a 'doorClosed' variable instead of a '!doorOpened' variable. Partial response to your "Secondly" question. Najlepsze komendy na FPS CS GO, Komenda na WH CS GO | Legalny wallhack w Counter Strike. The fact that code passes all the tests at this point either means mf really is never empty at this point, or that we dont have a test that exercises this code path.

But if we remove this line and rely on the loop increment, i is going to be incremented at the end of the loop, not halfway through, so we need to take that into account and make appropriate changes.

Of course, it does remove one of the many isPresent() checks, which I guess is a Good Thing, and it is using the Optional in a more functional style, which some people prefer.

Package Dont run this code if its an array operator.

Short story about the creation of a spell that creates a copy of a specific woman. To add to this, at some point the community, even Elixir codebase, settled on do_send_message as a convention but today we see it as a bad practice. Ive decided to give it a different name to last time to reflect whats really going on, its now getAndValidateMappedField. Jumpthrow bind. But for live code it is not adding anything (in development it can be a useful marker for further code). That said, there's a lot of hate for the empty else "it wastes lines" "extra typing", that are just bad. While similar questions may be on-topic here, this one was resolved in a way less likely to help future readers. Note that once again, I have not removed the use of the thing I accused of being a smell we still have if statements (a lot of them actually! Dont run this if its an array operator. In addition to the pattern matching that @dardub mentioned (), I might change the structure of the Messages modules functions to a tagged format so you arent using the if..then for control flow. As before, now Im reasonably happy with the state of one of these conditional Im going to extract the condition into a small method with a useful name so I can better understand what Im checking.

Were going to start with (more or less) the version of this method that has already benefited from the previous two refactoring blog posts. It somehow escaped my attention that what I've written as.

With regards to your door example, the two example names are not necessarily equivalent. Long ago mainframe (eg, PL/1 and COBOL) practice it was accepted that negative checks were less efficient. Why did the gate before Minas Tirith break so very easily?

465), Design patterns for asynchronous API communication. I always add a default clause even if it is empty. If the code isn't needed, don't write it. I use an empty else-branch (and sometimes an empty if-branch) in very rare cases: When it is obvious that both the if and else part should be handled somehow, but for some non-trivial reason the case can be handled by doing nothing. Many sales people will tell you what you want to hear and hope that you arent going to ask them to prove it.

What would the ancient Romans have called Hercules' Club? How would you know if you've written readable and easily maintainable code? That Jak wczy auto bunnyhop? It is obfuscated programming, causing even the most seasoned of programmers to back up and re-read the if condition in its negated form.

Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. The issue about avoiding negatives deserves some more attention though: Typically, whenever you need to use a boolean value, you need some blocks of code to operate when it's set, and some other blocks to operate when it's not set. To me, this would make it more of an expression approach using a case or with statement with a more understandable error workflow. What you don't write, nobody has to read and understand.

But weve reduced it from 11 to 8). Sadly it's not something you can always tell at a glance, let alone with a linter, hence the dogmatic 'always put an else block'. Going back to the original method, lets look at the last part of the code again: IntelliJ IDEA tells me, rather alarmingly, that despite all my isPresent checks, my mf.get()here could actually be on an empty field.

The GTA market is VERY demanding and one mistake can lose that perfect pad. '!doorOpened' variable.

Is it always possible to separate multiple conditions in an IF statement into individual statements?

One long If condition vs. many smaller conditions with checkpoints, How do nested ifelse statements outperform a series of single-selection if statements in C++. Was there a Russian safe haven city for politicians and scientists?

Like with all checks, general params can be applied. Premature Optimization is the Root of all Evil. This may imply using either doorClosed or !doorClosed as needed in various statements as required, resulting in potential confusion with the use of the negation.

His argument is that it makes clearer what the code is doing. It's good to continue to question yourself.

Here, we can use our ability to reason to figure out that actually these two ifs can be swapped: This should easily translate to an if/else: This does exactly the same thing, its just a bit easier to reason about.

even though it is functionally the same. That's usually right thing to do. does not make such a big deal in terms of readability.

I would have liked to use an ifPresent() here, but we cant combine that with the else code paths. The Rise of RAD and Its Application in the Tech Industry, We dont have to clutter our navigation/validation checks with conditionals for managing the looping behavior, we let a standard, We use more else statements, so its easier to reason around which code branches are executed and when, Weve moved early-exit code as close to the top of the method as possible, so that we can see those cases and ignore them when were looking further down the code. You have to do a quick check yourself to make sure this doesnt actually change the behaviour of the method, because potentially the method may have been returning two different values in the case of a null clazz: one value when the property path starts with $ and one where it doesnt. And therefore anyone reading the code with the else action needed would immediately suspect that something is missing and waste their time. Is it against the law to sell Bitcoin at a flea market.

So we have to identify the code that manages the looping, and replace those pieces with something that will work in a traditional loop. Let me give your an example: Now, in languages with C style or C style inspired syntax (such as Java, C# and JavaScript, just to name a few) this looks weird. If statements are very useful, and often the right tool for the job, but they can also be a smell. It signals to readers of the code (both human and automated analysis tools) that the programmer has put some thought into the situation.

We are trying our best to not use do_ prefixes in Elixir and use proper function names for them, even if it ends up being the original name with extra information, for example, check_shortname_and_send_message.