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Improving readability by decreasing indentation

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Readability of code can be vastly improved by decreasing indentation. In this video we'll reverse conditions and early returns to accomplish this.

If you want to see more videos like this one, head over to the video section at Spatie.

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Comments

avatar

Hi @Freek, thank you very much for this excellent video demonstrating the benefits of early returns. I recommended it to a junior developer that I am mentoring. If you don't mind, I'd like to add one more tip to what you have already said. I reverse the if condition to gain the benefit from an early return in the publish() method. What I typically do is include a redundant negative boolean method. So instead of writing if(! $this->isPublishable()) { return;}, I introduce a function like the one below:

function isNotPublishable(): bool 
{
	return !$this->isPublishable();
}

and call that in the publish() method instead of negating the condition inside the main function. It is not a hard-and-fast rule, but I have found that it helps with code readability significantly.

Love from, Malawi!

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Webmentions

Thore Sünert liked on 4th June 2020
Dominic Thomas liked on 4th June 2020
Borislav Borissov retweeted on 4th June 2020
Borislav Borissov liked on 4th June 2020
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Martin Iriga replied on 3rd June 2020
Explained so clearly and simply.Amazing!Definitely going to start doing this to clean up my code
Martin Iriga retweeted on 3rd June 2020
Devhaus retweeted on 3rd June 2020
imabug retweeted on 3rd June 2020
ArielMejiaDev retweeted on 3rd June 2020
Dainius retweeted on 3rd June 2020
Jigal Sanders replied on 3rd June 2020
Do you ever ever sleep??????
Tom Witkowski replied on 3rd June 2020
Ah, the headline was a bit irritating. I thought you mean better readability by using 2 instead of 4 spaces and thought whaaaaatttt!? 😅