0 votesclick to vote up

Robin Burchell: Coding antipatterns: excessive nesting Published Nov 30 2010 via RSS

meegoblogs

With apologies to Dave Neary for stealing his excellent word, 'antipatterns', from his talk at MeeGo Conference.

This is an opinion piece. Feel free to skip it if you already know what you're doing when writing code.

We all have things we dislike in code, sometimes it's indentation, sometimes it's a bit less trivial. One of my current pet hatreds is excessive nesting.

For those of you that don't know what I mean, if you see something like this:

void foo(bool bar, bool lol, bool hax, bool meep)
{
    if (bar) {
        if (lol || hax) {
            if (meep) {
                // do something
            }
        }
    }
}

Then you're probably a victim of excessive nesting.

If you're writing code like this then all I can say is you're probably doing it wrong.

That above example might be written better like so:

void foo(bool bar, bool lol, bool hax, bool meep)
{
    if (!bar)
        return;

    if (!lol && !hax)
        return;

    if (!meep)
        return;

    // do something
}

Generally speaking, you want your code to be like a river: to flow from one point to another, and branch off gracefully, but still continue flowing nonetheless.

In more technical terms, this makes it a lot easier to take appropriate actions at any of those junctions (if, say someone wants logging added for all of those returns in future) and makes your code a lot easier to read.

Please stop and think about what you're doing, and refactor if necessary rather than blindly adding another conditional. It might be easier to add another level of nesting, but you'll suffer in the long term. Think about it.

As a general rule of thumb, I personally think if you have more than three levels of nesting, you might need to think whether you need a new method, or whether you need to rethink your code's flow.