Refactoring on about:rileycsillag fka drewcsillag

Defunctionalizing Quicksort

Mon, 19 Aug 2019 21:55:48 -0400

I’ve know for a long time that you could convert any iterative function to be recursive and vice versa, but up until recently, I only knew how to go from iterative to recursive in a mostly formulaic way.

I recently saw a cool presentation where he shows a refactoring to deterministically (at least AFAICT) go from a recursive function to an iterative one. It took me a bit of rewatching and fiddling as to how to apply it, but now having done a few exercises, I have a good feel for it, and I thought perhaps using a slightly more involved example might help explain it to others.

Single Return Considered Harmful

Tue, 29 Sep 2015 12:00:00 -0400

It’s funny sometimes how when you’ve done something in a particular way for long enough, it’s easy to forget why you do it the way you do. I’ve been a big fan of early return for a long time and was recently challenged on my view. The argument I had received in favor of single return was dubious to me, but it’s always good to recheck why you do something when you’ve forgotten.

Refactoring Serial Calls To Leaf Calls

Mon, 22 Dec 2014 12:04:31 -0400

When dealing with the problem of a long method, the simplest thing you can usually do is to break it into it’s conceptual pieces and have a series of tail called functions that call the next chunk of the computation.

So given this:

private Thing methodThatIsTooLong(TypeThing arg1, OtherType arg2) {
   // chunk1
   // chunk2
   // ....
   // chunkN
}

You get:

Refactoring Flow Control And Conditionals

Mon, 14 Apr 2014 16:28:14 -0400

In the course of reading various design patterns and refactoring books (like Refactoring), I noticed while flow control is sorta mentioned here and there, it’s not addressed especially well. It mostly encourages things like replacing conditional with polymorphism and replace nested conditional with guard clauses and the like, rather than finding ways to straighten out and clarify code that contains flow control and conditionals.

One of my thoughts on flow control and conditionals follows one of the rules of the Zen of Python:

The Cult Of Abstraction

Thu, 10 Apr 2014 15:43:55 -0400

Given that people can get really touchy on the subject, let me state this up front: I’m not saying we should tolerate lousy code.

Over the course of my career, I’ve seen something that I will call “the cult of abstraction.” On the surface, this sounds like a good thing, until you need to debug their code. While on the surface, it’s all nice and pretty, and uses classic design patterns, when you actually want to find out what it does, you discover that: