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"The Clean Code Talks -- Inheritance, Polymorphism, & Testing"

Google TechTalks · 438.5K views · 2008-12-05 · 38:25

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Overview

Misko Hevery's Clean Code Talk shows how to use object-oriented techniques such as polymorphism to remove repeated if and switch statements. The result is code that is easier to test, understand and maintain.

On Hacker News

HN commenters recommend it as a thorough treatment of replacing conditionals with polymorphism and why flags and deep ifs can be code smells.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2009–2023

Topics

Software architecture & designTesting, debugging & developer tools
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clean codepolymorphismobject-oriented designtestingrefactoring

What people said

Mr_P · 2022-05 · Recommendation

It's not so much the existence of the flag, itself, but rather using an if-statement at the deepest-level of the call stack to conditionally modify behavior. This talk gives a great overview of why boolean flags (rather, if-statements) can be a code smell: [VIDEO] OP's blogpost advocates for data-oriented design (e.g. Entity Component Systems) as a mechanism for avoiding this, whereas the talk I've linked advocates for OOP. Both mechanisms are equally valid (imho) and are inline with widely-adopted industry practices for software architecture.

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VBprogrammer · 2010-06 · Recommendation

I completely disagree with the example given in this blog. I don't have time to give a full explaination but I believe the google clean code talks gives a far better arguement than I ever could. On the general principle I agree that overengineering is to be avoided, but I actually think the example shows a clear disregard for Object Orientated principles. [VIDEO]

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derwiki · 2009-09 · Recommendation

Google posted a tech talk about this a while ago: [VIDEO] which is more comprehensive than the posted article.

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Sources

Video by Google TechTalks, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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