In an object-oriented world, special exceptions are evil. To me, they ruin a well-structured framework\/project. Yet in the business world, they are fairly common. What do you do?<\/p>\n
I think the worse thing you can do is to actually add a special exception to a special-case free project. Once you do that, your project will take a downhill drive towards unmaintainability.<\/p>\n
Let’s say that you have a nice inheritance and polymorphism in place: a well-structured OO system. To be more specific, let’s say you have a base class Shape and a Circle and a Square as subclasses. Everything works nicely: you only care about the Shape class and everything else takes its polymorphic runtime form.<\/p>\n
Then, a business person comes in, with the usual time pressure, and asks you to implement something that resembles a Shape but it works a little differently. What do you do? You don’t want to spend some extra time to refactor the original structure. And you don’t want to implement a new structure as well — too time consuming.<\/p>\n
So what do you do? You add a special exception: you create a special-cased Shape. From now on, whenever you use the Shape object, you add the special exception to make sure something different is performed. Just a few lines of code. Everything works. You’re happy. You’re done. Quick.<\/p>\n
But you did something else. You just ruined a well structured OO project. From now on, anytime you use the Shape object, you have to duplicate the special exception. It’s only a matter of time when somebody forgets to do that. Ooops. A bug is let into the system. You created the opening with the special exception.<\/p>\n
What else did you do? A level of frustration to the maintainer. The system is much more difficult to maintain after that.<\/p>\n
Never do that! Take the time to do it right. Never put a special condition to a perfectly working OO system (with inheritance and polymporphism). Unless, of course, you don’t care… and you consider yourself a crappy programmer.<\/p>\n
I like the following saying: If you don’t have the time to do it right, will you have the time to do it over?<\/p>\n
You save some time at the time of implementation, but you will pay for it several times later.<\/p>\n
So, anytime you need to add a special condition, and it’s inevitable, refactor the code to support that, but don’t add a special condition. It never works.<\/p>\n
A better coder is a happy coder, don’t spoil that. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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