do any of you others have little coding mantras that save your behind?
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Don't write an
ifunless you know what theelsedoes and why.ifandswitchstatements can be replaced with object inheritance. Let compiler do the work for you! Anything can be written with map-reduce-filter if you try hard enough. Don't try too hard. If you're about to write some code, stop.Latest Articles:
Fun Exploring Div and Table UI Layoutall good rules of thumb although the if/switch one gets sticky so that's a rule to be bent a LOT. still, the idea is sound - don't use conditionals where you can use polymorphism although in .NET the runtime still does work to cast :(
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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I try to avoid adding a comparison to a comparison. And if I do I don't do Yoda conditions.
Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello
heh. The yoda conditionals were hammered into me in the late 80s/early 90s. The multiple comparisons are a necessary evil, as TKey isn't directly comparable. You have to use its
IComparableinterface. Oh how I wish .NET would let you declare a contract on operators. You can't. It's a limitation of .NET's generic types.When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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One of mine is - when dealing with
IComparablein .NET "Greater than is less than" What it means is Convertingif(10>5);
to
IComparableit readsif(0<10.CompareTo(5));
Note '>' vs '<'
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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Think twice, write once.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
only twice? I find a bout of analysis paralysis followed by headdesking a few times is really the way to go. :laugh:
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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One of mine is - when dealing with
IComparablein .NET "Greater than is less than" What it means is Convertingif(10>5);
to
IComparableit readsif(0<10.CompareTo(5));
Note '>' vs '<'
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
If you can't find a way to keep your logic nested <= three levels deep, find another profession or project, because you certainly don't want to be the one to debug that sucker. A function is an acceptable solution.
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If you can't find a way to keep your logic nested <= three levels deep, find another profession or project, because you certainly don't want to be the one to debug that sucker. A function is an acceptable solution.
I think it depends on the logic, and should be amended to non-trivial logic, because I wouldn't count things like null checks - validation - that sort of thing, unless they're convoluted. But that's me, and it served me well enough. Usually my debugger problems are complicated. I almost never actually debug. I Ctrl+F5 in visual studio and I either get the expected result, or usually I know where I went wrong because I develop very iteratively.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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only twice? I find a bout of analysis paralysis followed by headdesking a few times is really the way to go. :laugh:
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
It's a metaphorical twice as in more than once. Although I have found sometimes just taking a shot in the dark can be useful if you can learn from failure.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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It's a metaphorical twice as in more than once. Although I have found sometimes just taking a shot in the dark can be useful if you can learn from failure.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
I hear you. I just did that. But I learned from success. I mean, I was working from some sample code, in C++, on implementing B+ trees, but I ported it to C# and then rewrote it using .NETisms and adding features. Then I realized it was almost pointless without a little database system going with it because it only optimized situations where nodes are directly tied to disk access. On the other hand, I did the same thing with the regular B tree and it worked flawlessly, and is useful as an in-memory autobalancing tree structure (inserts and deletions are slow, searches are very fast and consistent - every search takes the same number of comparisons) so woo. but i guess someone already implemented one here. Not sure how mine stacks up, but it works.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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One of mine is - when dealing with
IComparablein .NET "Greater than is less than" What it means is Convertingif(10>5);
to
IComparableit readsif(0<10.CompareTo(5));
Note '>' vs '<'
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
Something similar: Never compare floats for equality. It may bite sooner than later.
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One of mine is - when dealing with
IComparablein .NET "Greater than is less than" What it means is Convertingif(10>5);
to
IComparableit readsif(0<10.CompareTo(5));
Note '>' vs '<'
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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One of mine is - when dealing with
IComparablein .NET "Greater than is less than" What it means is Convertingif(10>5);
to
IComparableit readsif(0<10.CompareTo(5));
Note '>' vs '<'
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
Another reason to avoid "Yoda conditionals":
if (10 > 5)
if (10.CompareTo(5) > 0):)
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined." - Homer
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One of mine is - when dealing with
IComparablein .NET "Greater than is less than" What it means is Convertingif(10>5);
to
IComparableit readsif(0<10.CompareTo(5));
Note '>' vs '<'
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
My mantra is "Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!". Way back when learning C, to help me remember to add the extra equal sign when writing a conditional statement as opposed to an assignment I would say "Equals to" and press the equal sign == for each word and to say "Equals" and only hit the equal = sign once for assigning a value.
It was broke, so I fixed it.
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One of mine is - when dealing with
IComparablein .NET "Greater than is less than" What it means is Convertingif(10>5);
to
IComparableit readsif(0<10.CompareTo(5));
Note '>' vs '<'
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
"Developers may come and go, but bugs will stay forever"
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Something similar: Never compare floats for equality. It may bite sooner than later.
Yep. Been there, done that, got the scars on my back from self-flagellation for trying it.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Think twice, write once.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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One of mine is - when dealing with
IComparablein .NET "Greater than is less than" What it means is Convertingif(10>5);
to
IComparableit readsif(0<10.CompareTo(5));
Note '>' vs '<'
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
Mine applies to date comparisons. "Later is greater"
Steady Eddie (for those that never saw "The Hustler")
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One of mine is - when dealing with
IComparablein .NET "Greater than is less than" What it means is Convertingif(10>5);
to
IComparableit readsif(0<10.CompareTo(5));
Note '>' vs '<'
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
"Check the plugs." Plugs being any of the following: - connection strings - method parameters - app settings "F5 and pray" Let-er rip and see what happens. Don't be afraid. 😁 I usually say a short prayer as my coffee is compiling / starting up.
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One of mine is - when dealing with
IComparablein .NET "Greater than is less than" What it means is Convertingif(10>5);
to
IComparableit readsif(0<10.CompareTo(5));
Note '>' vs '<'
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
Don't solve problems which don't actually exist. Like anything, this must be used in moderation. If there's a good, easy-to-understand abstraction you can implement which isn't required today , but you can see an obvious business case for it coming, go ahead. At the same time, be careful of overengineering just because you thought of some possible, but unlikely, abstraction. Design your code in such a way that can be implemented when the problem actually becomes something to solve.
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Something similar: Never compare floats for equality. It may bite sooner than later.
That is also one of the mantras I preached when teaching programming. But even though we had been teaching the kids about limited precision, it was very difficut for the to understand that "if ((1/3)*3 == 1)" could fail. (Except that if you really used constants, or compile-time-evaluated expressions, an optimizing compiler might remove the entire "if".) Students often have a vague understanding of terms like "integer" and "float" (or "real"). So I preferred to refer to them as "counts" and "measurements". That made it a lot easier for them to understand how both integers and floats behave in the computer. One of the great details of the APL language is the environment variable quadFUZZ (if my memory of the name is correct): When comparing floats, if the difference is less than quadFUZZ, the values are treated as equal. (I belive that the fuzz was actually scaled by the actual float value, so it was a realative, not absolute tolerance, but I am not sure - APL is too long ago!)
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Another reason to avoid "Yoda conditionals":
if (10 > 5)
if (10.CompareTo(5) > 0):)
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined." - Homer
one of those looks like a bug.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
