Many years ago, I took part in the development of a taxi-hailing mobile app that is still widely used today. I don’t know what kind of code they’re running now, but in those early days, the driver assignment code –if I remember it correctly– was similar in spirit to the grossly simplified example that follows. There are five levels of nested if statements in less than 30 lines of code. It doesn’t look so bad, some might say, but it’s not difficult to imagine how complicated this code can become with just a few more checks…
While I can get behind most of the advice here, I don’t actually like the conditions array. The reason being that each condition function now needs additional conditions to make sure it doesn’t overlap with the other condition functions. This was much more elegantly handled by the
elseclauses, since adding another condition to the array has now become a puzzle to verify the conditions remain non-overlapping.To each their own. Some won’t like the repeating code and some won’t like the distributed logic (i.e. you have to read every if and if-else statement to know when the else takes effect). I think the use of booleans like
isDriverClosemakes the repeated logic less messy and reduces inefficiency (if the compiler didn’t optimize for you).