Yeah.. I guess you don't need to encrypt the whole volume. I just do because it seems easier to me--largely because I do a terrible job of organizing my data.

which do you use/prefer and why?

or

ive always done the first, but ive switched to second and code seems cleaner and easier to read

I thought negative conditions are harder to maintain and more prone to being screwed up if the condition is modified?

it depends

I think it depends on how I think of it. If I think of something as a special case with a special return value, then I would just use if a return. Otherwise, I think else is clearer.

I really try to avoid having big functions that have a long split in control flow, though.

In general I'll do an early return from an abnormal/error condition.

Otherwise I won't unless it really bloats things up to do it "the right way."

i mean i guess you can just test the positive condition and then return, just the same, just depends on how you think of your variable

how do you work around it?

yeah this is pretty much the purpose

as opposed to putting the expected code in an else block

I like #2 but it might be a platform related answer. In node it's super standard and considered a best practice to pass an error in as the first argument of a function.

In my brain I naturally think "first in, first out", so it makes a lot more sense to exit early when I can. There's a lot of good variable names where both evaluating to true or false makes just about equal sense, and you can pick other names that make sense when trying to evaluate to false instead of true.

This is a good way to put it; it's how I feel about it.

refactor the long code blocks into their own functions, so the if and the else both have a single line of code that invokes the refactored function. not doing this is really bad imo if the code blocks have more than about 5 lines.

yeah, you don't want to have a situation where you have a 10+ line if block in the middle of your controller or logic, that quickly turns into a procedural mess of garbage

This.

Juk

s/spaces/tabs/

Yeah.. either refactor into separate functions or think about a way to let the two blocks share more code.

absolutely false

tabs are the worst

spaces ftw.

i'm guilty of this, sometimes when i break things into too many functions i feel like its a waste of time. its as if i feel more comfortable just scrolling down the page to see the progression instead of having to jump back and forth to different function locations in the file or in another file

there are images for spaces and tabs on that site, for the record

they're agnostic; they have insulting pictures towards all paradigms

ETA: as for breaking things into functions, the TDD zealots would say it's important to have for testing purposes. there's a healthy balance between having 500 functions and 1000 lines of code and 10 functions and 1000 lines of code, though - the balance is between as you noted

If there's one thing Lisp got right, it is there is no such thing as if-else syntax. Just the fact that people go around in circles over this stuff is proof enough of how horrendous "else" is.

At least in Python, I find I always always have to check to make sure I ~don't~ need an else statement to be sure that I don't get that one stupid bug leaking around that happens because I accidentally allowed code fall-through. This forces me to stop coding, write a bunch of stupid tests, and then figure out if "else" is really needed at all. Considering "if" is such an important part of programming, I can't help but think that this is a massive time-sink and (pun?) constricts my process.

I just try to use "else" as little as possible.

Pretty cool talk by Rich Hickey that he gave at RailsConf 2012.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI8tNMsozo0

There's apparently an expanded version. I sort of don't want to blow through an hour and half watching it. The RailsConf talk got me thinking about a whole slew of stuff and got me to really research ORM. Now that I have seen and read all the opinions, and then though really hard about how it would work in my application and what may happen in the future, I think all the naysayers of ORM hit the nail on the head: may be great right now, but woah to your future.

LOL

get a better editor or learn how to use your current one better

yea yea yea ill learn vim one day

no day but today

also vim is awesome; stop wasting your life in other editors.