One of my team members sent in the following piece of code, which is clearly
intended to update the OrderNumber field for all objects in a
List<T> of
objects that match a particular productId. I took one look at it and thought
"you can't do that!". But then I let the automated test run to see what
happens... lo and behold, it worked. And well it should, once I thought about
it.
Coding Horror, almost two years back, christened a name for the principle variously known as "don't repeat yourself," "once and only once," etc.: Curly's Law. Excellent formulation of the principle. In sending this to my development team, I thought it would be useful to pull this from the abstract to the specific through a few questions:
Something I was reading this weekend pointed out that leaving braces out of a one-line block can be dangerous. For instance, it is correct to code the following (and I do it all the time!)
if (someCondition)
this.doSomething();
