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Good Refactoring vs Bad Refactoring (www.builder.io)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Make its usage cleaner? I don't see how a property does that at all. We are talking about x.foo vs x.foo() really. And IMO the latter tells you this is a function that needs to do some work even if that work is very cheap. x.foo implies that you might be able to set the value as well. But with computed properties maybe not. Which IMO makes the program a bit harder to read and understand as you cannot simply assume it is a simple assignment or field access. It could be a full function call that does different things depending on other values or even if you are setting vs getting the value. I prefer things being more explicit.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Because you're assuming foo won't be renamed when it becomes a function. A function should start with a verb, say get_foo(), because just foo() tells me nothing about what the function does. If you make it a property, get_ is implicit.

So if the age is computed from the year of birth for example, it's really e.g. thing.age or thing.get_age() - both of which are fine, but I'd pick the property version.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Or just thing.age() which is fine and is fairly obvious it will return the age of the thing. And that is what is done in most languages that dont have computed properties. get_ on a method really adds no value nor clarity to things. The only reason foo() is ambiguous is because it is a bad name - really just a place holder. Missing out the brackets here adds no value either, just makes it hard to tell that you are calling a function instead of just accessing a property.