this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2025
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Programmer Humor

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The Six Stages of Code Grief (suppo.fi)
submitted 1 day ago by cm0002@suppo.fi to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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[–] Lightfire228@pawb.social 17 points 1 day ago (2 children)
  • if something feels too "heavy", like it's doing xml formatting, file manips, a db insert, and making coffee, all in a single class or function

Separate out those "concerns", into their own object/interface, and pass them into the class / function at invocation (Dependency Injection)

  • use "if guards" and early returns to bail from a function, instead of wrapping the func body with an if

public Value? Func(String arg) {
  if (arg.IsEmpty()) {
    return null;
  }
  
  if (this.Bar == null) {
    return null;
  }

  // ...
  return new Value();


  /// instead of

  if (!arg.IsEmpty) {
    if (this.Bar != null) {
      // ...
      return new Value();
    }
  }
return null;
}
[–] jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 2 points 20 hours ago

Lowering indent levels is nice in functions. Early returns mean you don't have to think as much. "If it got here, I know foo isn't null because it already would have returned".

[–] clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I always feel bad about putting little ifs at the top of functions. Is it not bad practice? I like them because they're simple to implement modify and read, but I have this voice telling me I need to make things more impressive.

[–] Jankatarch@lemmy.world 2 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

I started putting a helpful comment above the ifs as a seperator to cope with that.

public Value? Func(String arg) { 
  // Sanitize.
  if (arg.IsEmpty()) return null; 
  if (this.Bar == null) return null; 
  // Get [that] and/or do [this].
  var foo = this.baz.foo;
  ...
  return new Value();
}
[–] Lightfire228@pawb.social 2 points 19 hours ago

Never make things more "impressive"

Make them more comprehensible

Reduce the cognitive load required to understand and reason about a piece of code. Honestly, the more you can express complicated ideas simply, the more impressive you are