Although passive voice sometimes communicates effectively, I have learned to improve my writing by deliberately asking myself, “How could I rewrite that paragraph without using any passive verbs?” Similarly, after reading a bit of General Semantics, I found it very instructive to try to write and speak without using any form of the word “is”. Both exercises were worthwhile, even if I don’t do all of my writing under those conditions.

Some people reacted to Dijkstra’s criticism of the “goto” statement by rejecting it as unreasonable or impossible. Some reacted by proposing brute-force goto-ectomy practices that (further) obscured the structure of the code. But some took it as a challenge to rethink program design practices. Few languages today offer “goto” at all, much less as a primary composition mechanism.

Although I’ve been doing software for about 40 years now, I found it useful to reconsider some code I’d recently written in view of the constraints of the exercise under discussion. In one case, by forcing myself to remove one layer of conditional nesting, I recognized a hidden symmetry that I had not consciously noticed before.

Maybe some of us are so good as programmers that there’s no room for improvement or re-thinking. I make no such claim for myself. Instead, I found the exercise instructive.

You’re just writing spaghetti code by a different name

We call it “ravioli code” where I’m from… Code pasta with a proliferation of object pockets instead of procedural noodles.

Of course, everything can be taken to an extreme, so one has to know where and how to dial it in. E.g. I would guess in Java that putting the units (e.g. mph) into your types would suck pretty quickly, whereas putting them into the variable names wouldn’t be so bad and would help address the underlying concerns. I think that is an indictment of Java rather than a great thing, tho, that you can’t do lots of types conveniently.

But I think for some people this kind of exercise might prove to be sort of an eye-opener or something. Sometimes you need to come up with restrictions or rules to break out of your (bad) habits.