this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2025
398 points (96.9% liked)
Technology
73232 readers
4549 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Regarding the "bad code". It's more readable though to keep the full limit for each elif case, which is most often way more important than performance, especially since than logic with the age can be easily optimized by any good compiler or runtime.
Code readability is important, but in this case I find it less readable. In every language I've studied, it's always taught to imply the previous condition, and often times I hear or read that explicitly stated. When someone writes code that does things differently than the expectation, it can make it more confusing to read. It took me longer to interpret what was happening because what is written breaks from the norm.
Past readability, this code is now more difficult to maintain. If you want to change one of the age ranges, the code has to be updated in two places rather than one. The changes aren't difficult, but it would be easy to miss since this isn't how elif should be written.
Lastly, this block of code is now half as efficient. It takes twice as many compares to evaluate the condition. This isn't a complicated block of code, so it's negligible, but if this same practice were used in something like a game engine where that block loops continuously, the small inefficiencies can compound.
Good points! Keeping to the norm is very important for readability.
I do disagree with the performance bit though. Again, there will probably be no difference at all in the performance because the redundant code is removed before (or during [e.g. JIT optimizations]) execution.