But the readability and maintainability increases. We abstracted away conditional logic out of the main function by moving it into it’s own function.Īs you see the lines of code have actually increased since we introduced all these changes.We broke the conditional apart into logical bits that can be unit tested independently.We made the code self-documenting by using appropriately named functions and variables, removing the necessity for comments.We had incomplete comments describing what the if statement was doing and everything was in the main checkout function. We had everything crammed into one large conditional if-statement.

In principle, conditionals are an easy to grasp concept, and in their simplest form easy to read. That question might be the first thing on your mind. What’s so complicated about conditionals? (Extra) Avoid conditionals - Use polymorphism instead (covered in a future article).Early returns - Put always failing conditions first and return/throw, to avoid nesting.Decomposition- Group conditionals by concerns into variables or functions.

Naming - Assign statements to concisely named variables.

Abstraction - Hide deciding logic into concisely named functions.

Overviewįirst let’s summarize all the things I will cover, how to improve In this article I want to present how conditional statements can be written in a comprehensible way.

Readable code