The image above is a late 50’s MGA convertible. I picked this because I happen to think that this car is one of the most elegantly designed cars ever made. Certainly in the top 50. While we as people place a lot of emphasis on design when it comes to physical objects that we use, when it comes to software, a lot of our software’s design looks more like the car below: This vehicle looks like it was designed by a committee that couldn’t decide whether they were designing a door stop or a golf cart.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately (for reasons that will become apparent in a few weeks) about the lack of good software engineering practices in the data science space. The more I think about it, the more I am shocked with the questionable design that exists in the data science ecosystem, particularly in Python. What’s even more impressive is that the python language is actually designed to promote good design, and the people building these modules are all great developers.
As an example of this, I recently read an article about coding without if statements and it made me cringe. Here is a quote:
When I teach beginners to program and present them with code challenges, one of my favorite follow-up challenges is: Now solve the same problem without using if-statements (or ternary operators, or switch statements).
You might ask why would that be helpful? Well, I think this challenge forces your brain to think differently and in some cases, the different solution might be better.
There is nothing wrong with using if-statements, but avoiding them can sometimes make the code a bit more readable to humans. This is definitely not a general rule as sometimes avoiding if-statements will make the code a lot less readable. You be the judge.
https://medium.com/edge-coders/coding-tip-try-to-code-without-if-statements-d06799eed231
Well, I am going to be the judge and every example the author cited made the code more difficult to follow. The way I see it, hard to follow code means that you as the developer are more likely to introduce unintended bugs and errors. Since the code is difficult to follow, not only will you have more bugs, but these bugs will take you more time to find. Even worse, if you didn’t write this code and are asked to debug it!! AAAAHHHH!! I know if that were me, I wouldn’t even bother. I’d probably just rewrite it. The only exception would be if it was heavily commented.
