Early returns save lives
this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2024
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Programmer Humor
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Just going to leave this horror here. It's the post feed logic from Tesseract that determines what posts should be displayed or hidden.
If that's horror to you, you've been sheltered. That's quite readable, though I'd make the long lines into their own subroutines.
Delightfully devilish, indeed. You made it as easy to read as possible though.
Why not factor out the ! via de Morgan's laws (which would also remove most of the parentheses, as iirc && binds tighter than ||)? Also, does that language have a {#continue} sort of syntax for loops? If so, you could make it a guard clause.
Thank you, I knew the rule but did not know it had a name.
What is that, Vue?
That's why you set the alternate/exit cases as individual if statements before whatever was going to be inside the original if block.
To me too long to learn that.
My code got much more readable when I learned about early returns lol
Early returns improve readability in that they make it simpler to read, but I also find them decreasing readability in that you may miss an early return and wonder why is execution not hitting the line you expect it to
I'd say in most cases that's a sign something needs to be extracted into a separate function. Course sometimes code is just complicated and extracting only makes things harder to follow. Even then I'd much rather use early return than nested ifs as those are significantly harder for me to follow.
But what if I were to add more 'and'
It would be extremely painful
You’re a big function
For you
Gotta go fast