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Comment by cehrlich | Hacker News Reader

I tend to prefer the approach of

  fetch A
  wash A
  fetch B
  wash B

in terms of being easier to read. Of course sometimes there are performance benefits to firing off all the requests right at the start.

Anyway I definitely agree that not separating the core logic out from the data fetching/cleaning is a bad idea.

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The issue is if you need A, B, and C to do a task and your function fails if it doesn’t retrieve it, won’t it waste time cleaning ingredients for a dish you can’t make? I don’t think it’s less readable than

carrot = fetch carrot

onion = fetch onion

celery = fetch celery

clean(carrot)

clean(onion)

clean(celery)

cook(carrot, onion, celery)

This is absolutely true. But if cleaning your data takes barely any compute and only fails less than 1% of the time, it’s splitting hairs.

The way I think about it is, how would I write it if performance didn’t matter? And then from that point I think about what compromises I can make that improve performance at the expense of something else (readability, etc)

Disclaimer: I’m not trying to argue that my preference is _better_.

Yeah that's fair! This is one of those times when coding is similar to writing and mostly personal aesthetics.

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