Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

On the contrary, I've heard of a story where a team decided to apply some new tool to their codebase which warned about a missing break, inserted the break so the warning disappeared, "fixed" the failing tests that now resulted, and then upon the next release was subsequently screamed at by numerous customers for the unwanted behaviour change.

but in a very high-level language like PHP, there’s really no reason for switch to fall through at all

I disagree. Switch fallthrough is very useful because it can reduce code duplication, especially when the logic has a ladder-like structure. Trying to impose increasingly draconian and such arbitrary rules is only going to lead to a self-fulfilling-prophecy where all the intelligent developers will get fed up and leave, and what's left are those which will continue to create tons of bugs some other way instead.

Author here.

Yeah, you can't just mechanically insert the breaks :) I carefully went through each instance where my rule tripped, looked at the surrounding code, and figured out the right fix. Trying to automate that would indeed have lead to disaster -- and the lack of ability to automate this is why no one had done this in the past, it sounded like too much work. (It wasn't that much work.)

And I agree switch fallthrough can be useful! We just required it be annotated from now on, to convey the intent, as opposed to doing it by accident.

I don't think I would quit a company over a more stringent linter.

To me, this is the same attitude that leads to safety hazards in other industries. "I don't need safety measures because -I- am not an idiot".

Even the smartest developers make dumb mistakes. If you can eliminate some of those early with minimal friction, it's worth it. The earlier you catch a mistake, the cheaper it is. Linter rules are less of a hassle than bugs in production.

The kind of person who complains about the linter is the exact reason your company needs a linter.

It reduces code duplication at the cost of increasing complexity and error-prone-ness, and there are ways to reduce the duplication. For example, given the following snippets:

    switch ($foo) {
      case 123: 
        // do 1
      case 23:
        // do 2
      default:
        // do 3
    }
    
    if ($foo == 123) {
      do1();
      do2();
      do3();
    }
    else if ($foo == 23) {
      do2();
      do3();
    }
    else {
      do3();
    }

Yes, the second one is more verbose and duplicates code, but I think it's also far more clear in terms of intention.

You can even take it a step further:

    if ($foo == 123) {
      do1();
    }
    
    if ($foo == 123 || $foo == 23) {
      do2();
    }
    
    do3();

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