I’ve had this – somewhat controversial – opinion for a long time, that if you have an if-statement there’s something wrong with your design. Of course this is taking it a bit too far, but I think that the initial reaction for any developer that finds her-/himself writing an if-statement should be “could I do this differently”.
The last week I’ve been leading a new team and we’re starting a new project and we’ve been building a prototype for the product we’re going to build. It’s an API intended for internal use and I can’t talk to much about it but it’s not a trivial piece of software. It handles going out to external systems, aggregating answers from them, displaying the information in a UI and let’s the user communicate back to the external systems with additional information. The prototype has maybe something like twenty classes and a couple of hundred lines of code, now here’s the point of this whole post: this Thursday when at least 90% of that code was already written we wrote our first if-statement. I called it out “there it is!”. The other developers were like: “what?”. “-That’s our first if-statement”. The prototype is done and there is still one single if-statement in it, and it’s not that we’ve been trying to avoid it, we’ve just designed with the SOLID-principles in mind which leads to a more sound and less complex architecture.
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