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

Google Tech Talks
November 20, 2008

ABSTRACT

Is your code full of if statements? Switch statements? Do you have the same switch statement in various places? When you make changes do you find yourself making the same change to the same if/switch in several places? Did you ever forget one?

This talk will discuss approaches to using Object Oriented techniques to remove many of those conditionals. The result is cleaner, tighter, better designed code that's easier to test, understand and maintain.

Speaker: Misko Hevery

• Category

  Science & Technology

[neurosearch]

I'm getting tired of listening to such bad excuse for not writing clean code, maybe your co-workers should find another job instead of complaining about learning something new (it really isn't new, just something you don't learn detailed enough in school)

Have you ever tried to make a review or maintain an if/ switch - that just got bigger for each new feature?... that is not funny!!

[Jonothan Farr]

@Hax0rPr0n You're completely missing the point of the object oriented method and in particular an OO principle called the Open Closed Principle which states that software modules should be open for extension but closed for modification. This property allows us to add capabilities to a software system by adding new modules (i.e new subclasses) without incurring the risk of changing existing code. That's the main reason to favor inheritance over conditionals, it has nothing to do with clarity.

[Amir Halperin]

Another great talk from Misko Hevery.

10x

[Shockszzbyyous]

why wouldn'tyou write code that is easier to read and is cleaner ?

there is just no reason to not do it ...

[Nikolaii99]

i'm a complete noob... so i'm trying to learn how to organize my programs/applications into a collection of classes... and wrap my head around object oriented programming... i think this was helpful for understanding polymorphism (even to a beginner)... And it really makes me think about different ways to go about coding... The only thing i didn't understand was Guice... i'll have to look it up and learn more about it.

[allyourcode]

re expression modeling interview question: bonus points for visitor pattern :P

[allyourcode]

What about laden vs. unladen swallows? How can I effectively model that with single inheritance?

[peng yu]

eval can save the operator subclass! Kind of java person would do this...

[duncreg]

Sounds like there's something wrong with the language you're using.

[Tetteh Sackey]

you still need to check the operator and new up the appropriate subclass so, how are getting rid of if statements? am i missing something?

[azbiza]

this was refreshing, ty