[codecraft] Anti-IF Campaign

[Zakariyya Mughal]

On 2015-07-31 at 15:51:50 -0400, Michael Bar-Sinai wrote:
> Nice find! I forgot about this campaign, even though I linked to its original page once [1]. It's interesting to note that you can always replace control flow with inheritance, as long as you allow conditional expressions (e.g. Java's treaty operator). This is how SmallTalk's Boolean class worked.
> 

Coming back to this after a while, because I've been mulling this over.

I like the abstraction afforded by objects and polymorphism. It makes it
easier to fit a system into my head.

However, I also like performance. Balancing the two is difficult. What
recent work has been done in making it possible to have the best of both
worlds? Using polymorphism is still a form of branching and it can be
more expensive than inlining code since it can require multiple lookups
depending on how you dispatch.

So far I see work done on JIT, inline caching, profile guided
optimisation, program specialisation, and multi-stage programming, but
how much of that makes it out to everyday programmers? I know JITs and
inline caches are the most successful of these. The others seem less
prevalent. I am not a programming language system programmer, but I'd
like to learn more about these techniques.

In a related line of thinking, John Carmack wrote in [^1] about the
balance between different styles of programming where, in one, you split
functions into smaller functions and in the other, you manually inline
the functions so that it clear what you are actually running.

What has bothered me is that it seems that the language should help with
that directly — that's what languages are for, no?

Cheers,
- Zaki Mughal

[^1] "John Carmack on Inlined Code" <http://number-none.com/blow/john_carmack_on_inlined_code.html>.

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> [1] https://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2008/08/21/complex-table-cell-rendering.html <https://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2008/08/21/complex-table-cell-rendering.html>
> > On Jul 29, 2015, at 06:15, Philip Durbin <philipdurbin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > http://antiifcampaign.com <http://antiifcampaign.com/>
> > "The goal of the Anti-IF Campaign is to raise awareness of the effective use of software design principles and practices, by first of all removing bad, dangerous IFs."
> > 
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