I am Nico,
I am a senior engineer for a ticket broker based in London.
From the office! is a daily (almost) posting routine that I keep to journ...
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I can't stand yoda conditions.
They're much less readable and you're exploiting a side-effect of syntax to do something rather than relying on logic.
What I mean by this is that there are a lot of syntax errors you can make, and your IDE ot editor or linter will pick most of them up and at least warn you that you might be doing something incorrectly. It's just making work for yourself to try to take one part of that responsibility on.
It's like saying: "I need to take my wrecked car to get repaired except don't worry, I'll fix the left wing mirror myself".
Yes, I agree with you as it is not an ideal solution or a long-term one.
I don't like it either to be honest but at the same time I do not believe that everyone who is reading this article writes unit test all the time.
What solution would you give to the other readers to solve this? relying on the IDE?
Relying on one automated system to monitor potential syntax errors, yes. That doesn't have to be the IDE, it could be a VCS commit hook running a linter or a code review tool or something.
yes I use PHPStan and GrumPHP with git prehooks (gosh I hate that guy what it appears in red in my terminal hahahah).
What other package do you use?
To me this seems like a whole lot of debate for something that's really not that big of a deal.
To me it looks like people
Both of these would make this issue seem much bigger than it really is. Additionally, this only works if one of the things being compared to is a constant (like a number). It likely yields no benefit if both items are variables.
If your language does not insist that the if statement has to be a Boolean expression (the statement has to yield true or false, otherwise you get a compiler / syntax error), then you simply have to be a little more vigilant.
I have to alternate between C# and JavaScript at times, and I've made the mistake in JavaScript once or twice. But I also pick it up almost immediately when I do a simple test of the code by running it. Understanding the language being used a bit more intimately would result in some sort of "preventative" mindset whereby you'd know if you're writing an if statement that your syntax requires == instead of = (in the cases of languages like C#, JavaScript, and many more).
A better alternative might even be to create methods with descriptive names that return a true or false where you have the freedom to create a more readable and testable bit of code.
Couldn't agree more.
hahaha yes.
what about readability vs reliability? that is a more interesting debate
Thanks for the comment and I definitely agree with you.
More than Yoda vs no Yoda, I point that I tried to make in the article is readability vs reliability.
I went against what uncle Bob said in his book because I think we should give priority to reliability.
What do you think?
I actually don't think those are mutually exclusive.
In my opinion...
Readability is about descriptive names (methods, classes, variables etc.), following conventions in naming; anything that helps a human understand the code. Can I hand this to another developer that doesn't have all my context and will they be able to understand the code soon? That's the question readability answers.
Reliability is about stuff like defensive coding, error handling, null checking; stuff that ensures that the code works as intended with the fewest possible crashes. Has the code been tested with a variety of scenarios and are the results what we intended each time / handled if not? That's what reliability answers.
There's room for both to exist at the same time.
You'll notice that I mention testing a lot, and that's a very key part of making sure that code is reliable. Untested code works in theory, but testing measures the reliability 😃
I used to promote the use of yoda conditions many years ago when reviewing C or Java code, indeed the recommendation existed in the corporate secure programming guide that I maintained for years, however I have now changed my mind, as there are better options and this syntactic trick was fragile: if you forgot to use it, the compiler / runtime didn't notice. Here's what I've recommend more recently:
float!That is such a great comment...
I belive the match statement is a great feature of PHP 8 expecially the fact that it can throw a UnhandledMatchError if no evaluation is equal found
so, do you replace the use of ifs with the one of matches in your code? can you show an example of it
I have a short example in Rust from my advent of code 2021 archive:
github.com/phlash/aoc2021/blob/tru...
this show a simple parser that selects an action based on a command word
I'm curious why you say you previously would promote it when reviewing Java code? It doesn't seem like the issue should come up much in Java. Probably not at all. The condition
if (x = 4)in Java will be a syntax error. The only way it might come up in Java is with a comparison of booleans such asif (y = true)but a Yoda condition isn't the right stylistic fix for that regardless of your view on Yoda conditions. It would better simply beif (y). Do you have an example of when this might be applicable to Java?Literally because it was so long ago, and I've not touched Java in years, I said the wrong thing! I was probably meaning to say C++, we are talking mid 90s here 😄
That makes sense. By the way, cool username both here and on GitHub.
Personally, I don’t think the trade-off of worse readability is worth it with yoda conditions. This is the kind of syntax error a good linter will catch; better to use tools designed to help with these kinds of syntax errors than to make your code more difficult to read and debug.
Hey Andrew, thank you for your comment.
I agree with you that a good linter and the use of PHPUnit should be a must and they are definitely better practices than Yoda conditions.
If I think at a cons, though, is that when I was just starting to code I didn't know how to Unit test not to mention how to use Composer.
Simply inserting Yoda condition can be a good start with for juniors.
What is your view on that?
For the love of code, please use a linter to avoid assignments in conditions instead of reducing your code's readability. This crucial tool nowadays is even available for PHP, as well as for other languages.
Cannot agree more
I don't agree with the readability complaints. I find it hard to write.
The real issue is your language allows you to do this. And why others talk of lint tools.
shouldn't PHP allow to write them?
Yoda? Sure, but not an assignment in the if condition.
Have you ever used Yoda condition in your code? what happened next?
Modern tooling for the rescue: e.g. in PHP you can prevent assignments in conditions via github.com/spryker/code-sniffer/bl...