Hacker News Reader

Comment by st3v3r | Hacker News Reader

And what happens when one of those keys changes?

You change your code. Loose coupling a nice goal to aim for, but at the end of the day, somewhere deep down inside the code, you have to tightly couple to actually get anything done. Where that transition occurs is entirely programmer's discretion.

But there's a difference between changing it once when you serialize/deserialize it, and changing it every time you try to access the key.

Writing the code with the assumption that a key will change is on the same level with premature optimization, in my opinion.

It might be reasonable to make the assumption for some keys. In these cases a function taking the data and key as arguments and returning the value is sufficient and appropriate.

Frankly, if the code base is so littered with references to that specific data and key combination it might actually indicate a poor design.

"Writing the code with the assumption that a key will change is on the same level with premature optimization, in my opinion."

Considering how easy it is, and how often I've had keys change on me, I have to strongly disagree.

"Frankly, if the code base is so littered with references to that specific data and key combination it might actually indicate a poor design."

That's kinda the point of the article.

A single constant will fix that problem.

Or even just a search and replace...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com