The Pragmatic Craftsman         :: Simplicity from complexity :: | About Me |

In an object-oriented world, special exceptions are evil. To me, they ruin a well-structured framework/project. Yet in the business world, they are fairly common. What do you do?

I think the worse thing you can do is to actually add a special exception to a special-case free project. Once you do that, your project will take a downhill drive towards unmaintainability.

Let's say that you have a nice inheritance and polymorphism in place: a well-structured OO system. To be more specific, let's say you have a base class Shape and a Circle and a Square as subclasses. Everything works nicely: you only care about the Shape class and everything else takes its polymorphic runtime form.

Then, a business person comes in, with the usual time pressure, and asks you to implement something that resembles a Shape but it works a little differently. What do you do? You don't want to spend some extra time to refactor the original structure. And you don't want to implement a new structure as well -- too time consuming.

So what do you do? You add a special exception: you create a special-cased Shape. From now on, whenever you use the Shape object, you add the special exception to make sure something different is performed. Just a few lines of code. Everything works. You're happy. You're done. Quick.

But you did something else. You just ruined a well structured OO project. From now on, anytime you use the Shape object, you have to duplicate the special exception. It's only a matter of time when somebody forgets to do that. Ooops. A bug is let into the system. You created the opening with the special exception.

What else did you do? A level of frustration to the maintainer. The system is much more difficult to maintain after that.

Never do that! Take the time to do it right. Never put a special condition to a perfectly working OO system (with inheritance and polymporphism). Unless, of course, you don't care... and you consider yourself a crappy programmer.

I like the following saying: If you don't have the time to do it right, will you have the time to do it over?

You save some time at the time of implementation, but you will pay for it several times later.

So, anytime you need to add a special condition, and it's inevitable, refactor the code to support that, but don't add a special condition. It never works.

A better coder is a happy coder, don't spoil that. :-)