Code Smell 27 — Associative Arrays
Code Smell 27 — Associative Arrays

Photo by Melissa Askew on Unsplash

Problems

Coupling

Information Hiding

Code Duplication

Fail Fast

Integrity

Solutions

Reify objects Create cohesive small objects Don’t leave them anemic, find their cohesive relations.

Sample Code

Wrong

Anemic

Validated

Right

Degrees deserves reification

Many people suffer from primitive obsession and believe this is over design. Designing software is about making decisions and comparing trade-offs. The performance argument is not valid nowadays since modern virtual machines can efficiently deal with small short-lived objects.

Detection

We cannot forbid Associative Arrays since they are very good as a first approach.

They will be fine for exporting data, serialization, persistence and other accidental implementation issues.

We should avoid them on our systems.

Tags

Primitive

Conclusion

When creating objects we must not think of them as data. This is a common misconception.

We should stay loyal to our Bijection and discover real world objects.

Most associative arrays have cohesion and represent real world entities, and we must treat them as first class objects.

Relations

There’s nothing more permanent than a temporary hack.

Kyle Simpson
['Maximiliano Contieri']
['Code Smells', 'Arrays', 'Software Development', 'Clean Code', 'Programming']