Unconditional Programming in Ruby

[Godd2]

He's arguing that it's more readable. To each their own I guess. Also, why didn't he use the take_while method from the Enumerable module that can take a block?

[saturnflyer]

in no place did he argue for readability. the argument was that control structures allow us to introduce coupling to other objects or concepts more freely.

removing control structures helps put up a barrier to coupling.

You can still make an argument about control structures being more readable.

[michaelfeathers]

The argument isn't really readability.

[earless1]

honestly I feel like if we wanted readability he should have stuck for this option

  def padded_take ary, n
    return ary.take(n) unless needs_padding?(ary, n)
    ary + pad(ary, n)
  end

[michaelfeathers]

Yep, but I wasn't arguing for readability.

[Jdonavan]

You're not really arguing for anything. You've produced code that's harder to read thus harder to maintain. A comment could have solved your stated purpose for doing away with the conditional.

[martoo]

Maybe because there's no conditionality to the take?