I was mildly annoyed the other day when someone moved a works-fine function and reimplemented it with dropwhile. This apparently was a divisive idea.
Me: it worked fine. Don’t reimplement it for no gains. Don’t send people to somewhat esoteric parts of the standard library. No one on this team is going to know how that function works off the top of their head.
Them: it’s in the standard library it’s fair game. It still works.
One benefit of using dropwhile is that (with a bit of practice) it can actually be easier to read than a for loop. All for loops look similar. You need to read the for loop line by line to understand what it really do.
With dropwhile (or map, filter and reduce), it’s immediately obvious it will drop all elements until a certain condition turns false.
I was mildly annoyed the other day when someone moved a works-fine function and reimplemented it with dropwhile. This apparently was a divisive idea.
Me: it worked fine. Don’t reimplement it for no gains. Don’t send people to somewhat esoteric parts of the standard library. No one on this team is going to know how that function works off the top of their head.
Them: it’s in the standard library it’s fair game. It still works.
One benefit of using dropwhile is that (with a bit of practice) it can actually be easier to read than a for loop. All for loops look similar. You need to read the for loop line by line to understand what it really do.
With dropwhile (or map, filter and reduce), it’s immediately obvious it will drop all elements until a certain condition turns false.