Fredrik Normén

# re: Lazy Developers?

You are not stupid, that kind of 'argument' not only reflects a lazy attitude, but also is disregarding the fact that adding appropriate validation will in the long run result in developers having to write less code; as validation is often a good defense against introducing bugs that inevitably will have to be fixed.

# re: Lazy Developers?

I think one big reason for this lazy thing is that most people learn from reading other peoples code and if validation is missing from most of the code samples it will not get through to the readers...

# re: Lazy Developers?

A former boss me told me that the reason I was better programmer then most she knew was that I where lazy, and tried to get the best code as fast as possible. I didn't agree with her, because I use a lot of time on refactoring my code until I have a certain degree of satisfaction.

I believe that the reason that people tend to jump over the validation stuff is because the tools don't support validation out of the box.

# re: Lazy Developers?

I often used the 'less code is better' argument, but it's actually a bad argument. You shouldn't write the least code as possible; you should write the most maintainable code as possible! When I look back at my ‘less code is better’ period, I see sometimes obfuscated one-liners, that are hard to read, hard to maintain. The people who skip validation, possibly believe in the ‘less code is better’ philosophy.

Writing validation leads to more maintainable code, because after reading the first few lines of a function you know exactly what the preconditions are. Besides that, not validating your public (and protected) members complicates your API and often creates a debugging hell. How many times did some external code throw a NullReferenceException in your face from deep down the stack? Sometimes it's like finding a needle in a haystack.

B.t.w. I’m a lazy programmer too, so I created code snippets that allow me to insert these lines of validation very quickly. And otherwise I think tools like Resharper can help you on that, so laziness can never be a good reason to skip validation.

# re: Lazy Developers?

I may be lazy, but I am also impatient. Which is why I'm a huge advocate of fail-fast programming, including always checking your parameters before you bother doing anything else.

# re: Lazy Developers?

Some developers are lazy, no doubt about it (I can be that too sometimes). What bothers me is how the laziness is often excused with arguments like "there was not enough time".

For argument validation I usually use a utility class, for example:

Guard.ArgumentNotNull("type", type);

# re: Lazy Developers?

Its not lazyness that makes the dev implement validation, its stupidity/ignorance/lack of competence.

Its like not paying the bills, its very boring but the consequenses of not doing it is pretty bad.

# How to validate a method's arguments?

Yesterday I wrote a post about developers that skip validation of arguments . In this post I will give

# How to validate a method's arguments?

Yesterday I wrote a post about developers that skip validation of arguments . In this post I will give

# re: Lazy Developers?

I am certainly validating arguments on public methods. Do you validate on each and every method you add to your code? even the mst inner private methods?

# Use constraints instead of argument validation

I will still continue with the argument validation track in this post also, I think it's an interesting

# Use "constraints" instead of argument validation for int and double etc

I will still continue with the argument validation track in this post also, I think it's an interesting

# ???????????? (2008-05-20) [JeffHung.Blog]

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