Don’t be anti-negative

The negative conditionals in code blocks are most of the time difficult to read and understand.

It becomes worse when you make the conditionals anti-negative.

Before

Anti-negative conditionals

Try to read above code snippets and try to understand it. Please note the highlighted parts. Does that code reads like

  • When inverse of a package is not damaged then report an error: “Package is damaged”.
  • When inverse of a package is not empty then report another error:
    “Package is empty”

Ouch! Unreadable? Complex? Painful, isn’t it? Let’s revisit the same condition with positive conditionals.

After

Positive conditionals

Another example:

Before:

Set hours logged when it is not NonWorkingDay. What?

Above snippet is showing hours worked for the day if it’s not non-working day!

After

Set hours logged when it was working day.

Now, this reads like simple statement. Show hours worked for working day.


Dattatraya Kale

Aspiring agile software craftsman, clean code, polyglot, in love with different programming paradigm. I am on a never-ending journey towards mastery of software.