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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

I often add an extra line or two of no-op code in order to improve readability. But in these examples, the code clearly wasn't written to communicate anything, but rather by mistake.

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Rule author here. Would love to see some examples! I think the closest I’ve (knowingly) done to this is to add an empty else clause that contains a comment.

So one thing I try to be very good about is never doing more than one thing in a line, which means always using named conditions and named returns. So in other words, if statements and return statements should always contain a single variable that describes the condition or what's being returned, and should not contain function calls, boolean logic, etc. This typically involves giving things descriptive names and then not using them more than once, but it makes the code more readable.

So e.g. you have lines like:

  const isCar = (wheels === 4) && (steeringWheels === 1) && (canDrive === true);
  if (isCar) { ... }

and not lines like:

  if ((wheels === 4) && (steeringWheels === 1) && canDrive === true) { ... }

And similarly:

  const isCar = (wheels === 4) && (steeringWheels === 1) && (canDrive === true);
  return isCar;

Rather than:

  return (wheels === 4) && (steeringWheels === 1) && (canDrive === true);

I'd actually like linters for JS and Python to enforce named conditionals and named returns, but afaik no one has done this yet.

I don't think the author was looking for this kind of example. Everything in your code is useful, so this category of linter would not complain.

Other linters might complain about `==`, though ;)

Interesting. I see what you're saying, and I don't know if I would characterize that as no-op code. All of that code will run. What I see there is redundant assignments, which I agree can act as a great form of code comment.

Often a code comment can be avoided (and clarity improved) by giving a name to an intermediate value rather than letting it be a nameless expression.

I like it! But I don't think of this a no-op code and would not imagine a lint rule objecting to it. That said, a code minifier (or compiler) would be well positioned to optimize that code, so you shouldn't even have to worry about even the thought of perf implications.

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