Nested IFs

Today I’m going to rant a little bit about people going crazy with nested IF statements. Ruby programmers, you are especially guilty (and proud to be). Its not uncommon at all to see:

if condition1
  if condition2
    do_something
  end
end

When in any other language, everyone would prefer:

if condition1 && condition2
  do_something
end

You can definitely make an argument that its easy to change this logic later, but I’d be against any argument that says the readability is higher here. Given that there are no ELSE statements, the two boolean are logically tied to each other. That’s exactly why we have the && operator.

Bonus Rant!

def func
  if condition1
    do_something
    do_something_else
  end
end

I know everyone likes avoiding the return keyword, but wrapping an entire method’s body in an IF cries out to be this:

def func
  return nil unless condition1
  do_something
  do_something_else
end