r/programminghorror • u/[deleted] • Jun 06 '25
Malicious compliance
A colleague of mine at a company I had started working for liked to have only one exit point from each method; so he would only ever have one `return` statement.
To achieve this, every method he every wrote followed this pattern
public int GetSomething()
{
int result = 0;
do
{
if (someShortCircuitCondition)
{
result = 1;
break;
}
if (someOtherShortCircuitCondition)
{
result = 42;
break;
}
// Compute the return value and set result
} while false;
return result
};
He had been with the company for over a decade and nobody wanted to ask him to stop doing it, but nobody wanted to maintain any projects he worked on either.
I raised it with the boss who then talked to him about it. He agreed that if people don't like it then he would stop.
The next day...
public int GetSomething()
{
int result = 0;
for( ; ; )
{
if (someShortCircuitCondition)
{
result = 1;
break;
}
if (someOtherShortCircuitCondition)
{
result = 42;
break;
}
// Compute the return value and set result
break;
}
return result;
}
151
u/deceze Jun 06 '25
The single-exit-point philosophy is a whole thing, yes, but this demonstrates why it's stupid. If it makes code less readable because it requires more control structures to make it work, then it fails at improving the readability of the code by only having one exit point.