Don’t Suffer Poor Names

You know the problem: you write a method for one purpose and give it a name.  Later, it become useful for something else, or maybe you change it slightly to accommodate another use, or maybe some names change elsewhere making the current name obsolete.  You have all seen code where someone says that the name “is historical” or traditional.  This post is to say with conviction that that history is NOT interesting, and get rid of it.  Get a good IDE and change those names to be correct.

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#22 Avoid Multi-purpose Methods

This post is about the tendency to make a single method which does a lot of things depending upon the parameters sent in.  A method should not have multiple purposes, but should have a single purpose, and that purpose should be clearly named in the method name.  I have an example, and I show how it can be improved.