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Comment by in9 | Hacker News Reader

I love how this is clearly a contextual recommendation. I'm not a software developer, but a data scientist. In pandas, to write your manipulations in this chained methods fashing is highly encouraged IMO. It's even called "pandorable" code

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The latter example (without the redundant assignments) is preferred by people who do a lot of line-by-line debugging. While most IDEs allow you to set a breakpoint in the middle of an expression, that's still more complicated and error prone than setting one for a line.

I've been on a team that outlawed method chaining specifically because it was more difficult to debug. Even though I'm more of a method-chainer myself, I have taken to writing unchained code when I am working on a larger team.

  var frobnitzBuilder = Frobnitz.builder();
  frobnitzBuilder.withPixieDust();
  frobnitzBuilder.withMayonnaise();
  frobnitzBuilder.withTarget(worstTweetEver);
  val frobnitz = frobnitzBuilder.build();

...is undeniably easier to step-through debug than the chained version.

Might depend on the debugger? The main ones I've used also let me go through the chained version one at a time, including seeing intermediate values.

TBH, the only context where I've seen people express a strong preference for the non-chained option is under the charismatic influence of Uncle Bob's baleful stare.

Otherwise, it seems opinions typically vary between a strong preference for chaining, and rather aggressive feelings of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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