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Discussion on: Keeping your code clean by sweeping out "if" statements

 
laughingraven profile image
Laughing Raven • Edited

As an electrical engineer, coding is only a small part of what I do. The rest of my day is spent in planning, documentation, testing for regulatory compliance and debugging. Then again, I write firmware for medical equipment. It must be correct or people die.

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skyl profile image
Skylar Saveland

Imperative style with lots of ifs takes a lot more unit tests to prove it works compared to declarative style. One shouldn’t be debugging, one should be testing and isolating complexity out of the main program. This thread is scary, frankly.

Don’t worry about cyclomatic complexity, just do a lot of debugging to make sure people don’t die? Hrm ...

If it has to work or people die, then you really should scrutinize every if statement carefully and see if you can get rid of it. Many ifs are bugs waiting to be discovered.