Only a few of these are actual programming tricks. The problem with sharing them is that they'll typically seem obvious to you, since you know them. It's difficult to know what is actually unknown to other people, and if you share stuff everybody knows you risk coming off as arrogant.
Here's one that I think more people should know: avoid branches. If I can do the same thing without an if statement and even a logical expression, the code typically both becomes easier to understand for people and easier to run for the CPU.
I'm struggling to comprehend how branches can be avoided (or why one would want to, as they are the cornerstone of programming). I can only think how to obfuscate them, which is rarely useful.
well here is a branching strategy I often see, pseudocode, and often this is a really stupid example as I do not have the time to come up with a good one:
if Val === "A" then
Do funcA()
else if Val === "B" then
and so forth for lots of values, or using a switch statement or similar branching instead of
Object functions = {
"A": funcA() {does what funcA does},
"B": funcB() {does what funcB does}
etc. etc.
Actually writing it I remember now someone who did this, a junior who had to update a validation function for XML invoices based on their root namespaces, which there could be a large number of these, and so she wrote out
I can't remember all the details as this was almost 20 years ago, however while it was true that one branched on the schema, it made much more sense to look up what one was supposed to do based on the rule for branching and then just execute that one action rather than writing a bunch of branching logic.
So to make it more concrete: Once branching rules becomes sufficiently complex prefer query for what you should do rather than branching
on edit: note again, not real code, but should be understandable and translatable into real code to understand what is being said easily enough.
on 2nd edit: this is also just basically one of the things I prefer instead of getting a lot of branching logic. I have never seen any stats on any benefit to this model than just having a bunch of branching statements, but I feel that the benefit is there nonetheless.
winternewt · · focus · HN ↗
Here's one that I think more people should know: avoid branches. If I can do the same thing without an if statement and even a logical expression, the code typically both becomes easier to understand for people and easier to run for the CPU.
cachvico · · focus · HN ↗
bryanrasmussen · · focus · HN ↗
if Val === "A" then Do funcA() else if Val === "B" then
and so forth for lots of values, or using a switch statement or similar branching instead of
Object functions = { "A": funcA() {does what funcA does}, "B": funcB() {does what funcB does} etc. etc.
}
runnableFunction = functions[val]; runnableFunction();
Actually writing it I remember now someone who did this, a junior who had to update a validation function for XML invoices based on their root namespaces, which there could be a large number of these, and so she wrote out
switch namespace == "somenamespace" { validatingscheme = "someschema"; doPreliminaryFunctionToDetermineifshouldvalidate(); }
I can't remember all the details as this was almost 20 years ago, however while it was true that one branched on the schema, it made much more sense to look up what one was supposed to do based on the rule for branching and then just execute that one action rather than writing a bunch of branching logic.
So to make it more concrete: Once branching rules becomes sufficiently complex prefer query for what you should do rather than branching
on edit: note again, not real code, but should be understandable and translatable into real code to understand what is being said easily enough.
on 2nd edit: this is also just basically one of the things I prefer instead of getting a lot of branching logic. I have never seen any stats on any benefit to this model than just having a bunch of branching statements, but I feel that the benefit is there nonetheless.