this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
85 points (86.3% liked)
Programming
17432 readers
199 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Or
I would argue that the validate routines be their own classes; ie
UserInputValidator
,UserPasswordValidator
, etc. They should conform to a common interface with avalid()
method that throws when invalid. (I’m on mobile and typed enough already).“Self-documenting” does not mean “write less code”. In fact, it means the opposite; it means be more verbose. The trick is to find that happy balance where you write just enough code to make it clear what’s going on (that does not mean you write long identifier names (e.g.,
getUserByEmail(email)
vs.getUser(email)
or betterfetchUser(email)
).Be consistent:
get*
andset*
should be reserved for working on an instance of an objectis*
orhas*
for Boolean returnsfetchUser()
,validate()
,create()
UserService.createUser()
valid
vsisValid
const
unless you absolutely have to reassign its direct value; I.e., objects and arrays should beconst
unless you use the assignment operator after initializationif {}
statements. Short-circuiting is cutesy and all, but it makes code more complex to read.{}
to create small groups of related code. You’re not penalized for the white space because it gets compiled away anyway.There is so much more, but this should be a good primer.
I wouldn't. Not from this example anyway. YAGNI is an important paradigm and introducing plenty of classes upfront to implement trivial checks is overengineering typical for Java and the reason I don't like it.
Edit: Your naming convention isn't the best either. I'd expect
UserInputValidator
to validate user input, maybe sanitize it for a database query, but not necessarily an existence check as in the example.Classes, functions, methods… pick your poison. The point is to encapsulate your logic in a way that is easy to understand. Lumping all of the validation logic into one monolithic block of code (be it a single class, function, or methods) is not self-documenting. Whereas separating the concerns makes it easier to read and keep your focus without mixing purposes. I’m very-engineering (imo) would be something akin to creating micro services to send data in and get a response back.
If you go back to my example, you’ll notice there is a
UserUniqueValidator
, which is meant to check for existence of a user.And if you expect a validator to do sanitation, then your expectations are wrong. A validator validates, and a sanitizer sanitizes. Not both.
For the uninitiated, this is called Separation of Concerns. The idea is to do one thing and do it well, and then compose these things together to make your program — like an orchestra.
Oops, right, I just glanced over the code and obviously missed the text and code had different class names. Another smell in my opinion, choosing class names that only differ in the middle. Easily missed and confusion caused.
I don't think our opinions are too far off though. You're just scaling the validation logic to realistic levels and I warn that in practice coders extrapolate too quickly and too often, which results in too much generic code which is naturally harder to understand and maintain than specific code.