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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

Edmond Kachale 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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