Code Smell 44 - Magic Corrections

Compilers are smarter than us. On a Friday night production deploy they betray us.

Problems

• Fail Fast

• Declarativeness

• Ambiguity

Solutions

1. Fail Fast

2. Do not trust magic coercion.

3. Be Explicit

Examples

• Type Casting

Sample Code

Wrong

	<?
	new Date(31, 02, 2020);
	1 + 'Hello';
	!3;
	// Valid on most languages

view raw smarty.php hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Right

	<?
	new Date(31, 02, 2020);
	// Throw an exception
	1 + 'Hello';
	// Type Mismatch
	!3;
	// Negating is a boolean operation

view raw failFast.php hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Detection

Many of this vicious are encouraged by languages themselves.

We should be very declarative and explicit and don't abuse language accidental magic solutions.

Tags

• Declarative

• Smart

Conclusion

Programmers pretend to be smart by exploiting language features.

They feel they belong to community standards that enforce bad behaviors like a sect.

Relations

Code Smell 06 - Too Clever Programmer

Maxi Contieri ・ Oct 25 '20

#codenewbie #tutorial #beginners

More Info

Fail Fast

Maxi Contieri ・ Dec 6 '20

#codenewbie #programming #webdev #oop

Credits

Photo by Senor Sosa on Unsplash

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Hackers are arrogant geek romantics. They lack the attentive spirit of inquiry.

Bruce Sterling