The Anti-If Campaign

http://www.antiifcampaign.com/

by vaksel • 17 years ago

17 25 17 years ago

scott_s3• 17 years ago

Oddly named campaign to promote better use of inheritance. "The Anti-Type Fields Campaign" would be more appropriate and less confusing.

henning• 17 years ago

Inheritance or polymorphism?

scott_s3• 17 years ago

Polymorphism. I knew just saying "inheritance" didn't feel right. Thanks.

davidw2• 17 years ago

calambrac gets it right: 'dispatch'. I though the article was going to be about pattern matching, actually. I guess polymorphism is a sort of pattern matching, but the real thing goes farther.

tptacek6• 17 years ago

It's not about type fields and tag-and-switch. It's about the "if" statement. Let's be clear about how batsh*t crazy this messaging is.

scott_s3• 17 years ago

If you read their content (what little there is), it's type fields that they actually object against. I don't think they're actually saying "remove all ifs from code." If they are, then, yes, that would be batshit crazy. Instead of being crazy, though, I think they're just ineffective at communicating their message.

calambrac2• 17 years ago

Don't solve with conditionals that which can be solved by your language's dispatch mechanism.

tptacek6• 17 years ago

Don't solve with 15 minutes that which you can bill your client 80 hours for.

stcredzero3• 17 years ago

And don't forget, lots of those 15 minute intervals can add up to serious money. ("Stovepipe" systems.) You can also set up an opportunity to bill for coming later in and "fixing" a seemingly intractable big mess.

calambrac2• 17 years ago

In retrospect, my comment sounded like it was reaffirming the article's point, but that's really not how I meant it (snark fail on my part).

I agree with what you're getting at, and I think that the idea of popularizing "AntiIf" as a slogan is really stupid and dangerous. The first eager intern who suggests refactoring some code because "ifs are bad", I'm not a religious man, but God help them.

What I was trying to point out is that the single example they have up right now showing that 'if' is "bad" is dispatching on types, which a good number of languages support out of the box (in other words, it's a strawman). If you're already inspecting types, then they presumably already exist, so there's no additional overhead in using your language's features to get clearer code when you can.

J_McQuade• 17 years ago

This sort of debate annoys me - not so much because of the potentially fragile design on one side or the perhaps pedantic adherence to OOP principles on the other, but because I know that I could have things like pattern matching and a scarily expressive type system and, well, that'd make a lot of these problems disappear.

Curse you, Haskell, for making me so bitter!

tptacek6• 17 years ago

This is a joke, right? They're making fun of all the programs you see that have 20 different forests of tiny classes spreading the logic of one function across 45 files, right?

erlanger• 17 years ago

You mean Lussumo?

aheilbut• 17 years ago

after vanquishing all if statements, we're going to go after function calls.

And after that, we will eliminate source code, because it's too complicated. Everything you need to do can be done with 5x7 index cards.

tptacek6• 17 years ago

First they came for the function definitions, and I said nothing, for I used lambdas.

jrandom• 17 years ago

This strikes me as particularly funny as I'm working on a module of code where I had to use a type field and an 'if' statement to get around a dynamic cast that was killing performance.

(Virtual functions were not an option as this was taking place inside an STL '==' comparator.)

wglb• 17 years ago

These days, I tend to use COND rather than IF.

Ah, but the page implies use bunches of teeny classes. Was that what Alan Kay had in mind when he coined "Object Oriented Programming"?

gabeybaby• 17 years ago

I think this "campaign" is aimed at a developer less capable than the crowd we see on HN. I used to work with a whole team of people where OOP is a strange concept. I think the Anti-IF rule can help people think in a more correct fashion if they're confused about Inheritance.

The Anti-If Campaign

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