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Abstractions Are Important 5 – Type Consistency

For the fifth post in this series, I’m going to start with a mini rant.

A Digression (Rant) About Enum

Over the last couple of years, enumerations/enums have been dying a slow death in the world of code that I write. I wasn’t every really an avid user of them, but they’ve definitely been declining even for me to the point of virtual-non existence. I’m not sure exactly what it is about them or about me that’s spurring this, but I’m not sorry about it at all. I don’t miss them.

I think perhaps the motivation has been an increasing desire to use polymorphism at all levels, even when the object I’m making doesn’t seem “classworthy”. That is, why would I create a “CardSuit” enum when I can just create a first class type for Suit? I think perhaps another factor in this approach of mine is that enums tend to go hand-in-hand with switches and I consider this pairing to be an anti-pattern. Even with an enum like “Suit” that is really just representing mutual exclusion, this is inevitable somewhere:

switch(mySuit)
{
    case Suit.Spades:
        return "Spades";
    case Suit.Diamonds: 
        return "Diamonds";
//etc
}

And, why do that when I could just have something like this:

public abstract class Suit
{
    public abstract string LongSuitName { get; set; }
//etc, as Suit needs additional behaviors that would otherwise go in switches
}

This way, I can later plop suit specific designations into inheritors to my heart’s content without hunting for switch statements littered throughout the code. (Also, for language agnostic readers, C# enums are a different beast than their Java counterparts — in C#, they’re really just glorified collections of constants).

Apparently, I’m not alone in this sentiment. Just to stir things up, I googled “C# enums are evil” and came up with this interesting link from stackoverflow guru Jon Skeet:

Since working on a Java project last year, I’ve been increasingly fed up with C#’s enums. They’re really not very object oriented: they’re not type-safe (you can cast from one enum to another via a cast to their common underlying type), they don’t allow any behaviour to be specified, etc. They’re just named constant integral values. Until I played with Java 1.5’s enum support, that wouldn’t have struck me as being a problem, but (at least in some cases) enums can give you so much more.

It’s good to see that the man who defines “10” when a recruiter or someone asks you to rate yourself 1-10 on strength in a language feels the same way as me. And, I think he really nails it with the non object-oriented comment. Enums make me feel like I’m writing kernel code in C or something when I use them.

If You’re Going to Use Them…

All that said, it’s not as if they’re going to be excised from the language tomorrow — we might as well make sure they’re used in a way that makes sense if and when they are used. In a code base that I’m in from time to time (and I’m obfuscating the problem domain a bit, but leaving the intent and meaning intact), the concept of “side” exists in the sense that anything in the domain must be left or right. Think of it as though we’re shopping for a pair of shoes. Here is how “side” is represented:

public enum Side
{
    None,
    Left,
    Right,
    Both
}

At first blush, this makes sense. We might have no shoes on, the left shoe, the right shoe, or both shoes. But, ask yourself this: “what is ‘side’ and what is it made of?” Left and right are somewhat mundane, but what about none and both? Is “none” a side? Is “both”? Do I put my “none” shoe on before the left shoe and right shoe, at which time I put on the “both” shoe? Can you infer the usage of this thing from looking at it? No, you really can’t…

And the reason you can’t infer the usage is that the enum consists of two sides and two expressions of quantity of sides. This enum is a chameleon — depending on where you’re standing and what part of it you’re looking at, it can be two different things. And, I submit that this is bad — if you’re going to use enums at all, use them to represent simple, mutually exclusive concepts (like the aforementioned “Suit” in the problem domain of playing cards).

What’s the Harm?

Let’s take a look at an example (stripped down for brevity) client of this enumeration:

public class Shoe
{

}

public class EnumClient
{
    private readonly Dictionary _shoes = new Dictionary();

    public void PutOnShoes(Side side)
    {
        if (side == Side.None)
            return;
        if (side == Side.Both)
        {
            PutOnShoes(Side.Left);
            PutOnShoes(Side.Right);
        }

        _shoes[side] = new Shoe();
    }
}

What we’ve got here is kind of cute and clever. If I want the client to put a shoe on, I pass in the side. But, if I want to tell it to put both on, then I can just pass in Side.Both, and the method knows how to handle this. Sweet! The only immediate drawback is the fact that we have to handle Side.None. Clearly that should be a no-op that clients should avoid, but it’s just as valid as any of the other things from the compiler’s perspective, so we manually no-op.

But, is this cute bit of recursion actually as sweet as it seems? What if we write another method like this called “TakeShoesOff”? What if we write a class called ShoeSalesman that retrieves pairs of shoes? We almost always want him retrieving both shoes for clients, so we’re probably going to want to perpetuate this pattern into his methods as well, probably by copy and paste to save time. How about a ShoeStoreCashier ringing up pairs of shoes? We can take care of that with our good buddy copy and paste too. There’s no method about shoes that we can’t handle that way!

But, wait a second? Isn’t this starting to be kind of a code smell? If this implementation is so sweet, why does it seem all wet in the face of DRY? If you have actually done this in hundreds or thousands of places, you should be getting a sinking feeling in your stomach right about now. That feeling is the feeling that your code is suddenly and subtly incredibly brittle. This cute little encoding over the enum is actually an algorithm that is everywhere in your code.

Let’s say that I want to get in on some cuteness myself. What I’d like to do is write a method and say, “I don’t care which side you pass me, so long as a side exists — I’ll just perform an operation on the first side that I have available, if any.”

public enum Side
{
    None,
    Left,
    Right,
    Both,
    Either
}

public class NewEnumClient
{
    private readonly Dictionary _shoes = new Dictionary();

    public void RemoveShoes(Side side)
    {
        if (side == Side.None)
            return;
        if (side == Side.Both)
        {
            RemoveShoes(Side.Left);
            RemoveShoes(Side.Right);
        }
        if (side == Side.Either)
            RemoveShoes(_shoes.First().Key);

        _shoes.Remove(side);
    }
}

I’ve now extended the cuteness to be more “flexible”, and I’m pretty pleased with myself, so I go ahead and deliver this code. No unit tests break, no problems emerge that I can immediately see, so life is good. But then, weird problems start to crop up after a while. People file bug reports saying that they add shoes and see nothing on the screen or that they remove shoes but nothing is deleted from the database. It’s kind of a mystery at first, but I’m forced to get to the bottom of this as the trickle of bug reports starts becoming an avalanche.

What’s going on?!? Well, what’s going on is that all of the Cute 1.0 code can’t handle the new enum I’ve defined for Cute 2.0. So, what does it do? Well, sometimes it skips it altogether and no ops. Sometimes it adds a new key to the dictionary — a key for which it never checks. Sometimes it throws some kind of exception where it falls into a “default” state in a switch statement someone has defined. Sometimes it throws up an error message box informing the user, “This should never happen — email Erik!” for the same reason, which is doubly bad since I’m probably going to be featured on the Daily WTF.

Wow, bummer. But, no big deal. I’ll just roll up my sleeves and upgrade Cute 1.0 to Cute 2.0 everywhere. How many can there be, right? Uh oh. Hope I’m not doing anything this weekend. For everything copy and paste programming lacks in being a good idea, it makes up for in its ability to spread through a code base like kudzu. It’s too late to revert Cute 2.0 since I now have clients that depend on it, so I’d better roll up my sleeves and get pastin’ because it’s going to be a long Saturday with some Mountain Dew and 7,400 methods that I need to change.

The Real Problem

It should be fairly obvious that any “pattern” requiring you to add 5 or 10 lines to the beginning of a bunch of methods is actually an anti-pattern, particularly if those lines are similar or identical. And some might stop here and say that getting cute in the first place here was the problem, but I contend that this is just a symptom. To tie this back in with the series, the real problem is one of abstractions.

As I asked earlier, what is “side”? Really, can you tell me? I mean if I have a “Customer” object in my domain, you’d probably say something like “that models a customer of the enterprise for which this application was written” or else maybe you’d just smack me upside the head for asking such an obtuse question. But for “Side” in Cute 1.0? Without using the word “side” in your definition? You might say “well, it represents where we can put a shoe” or “it represents the directions left and right”, and you’d be correct for two of the enums values. You might say “well, it represents a number of places that you can put a shoe” or “its a flag that you need to use to tell your methods how to behave” and you’d be right for the other two values. Hmmm….

I know! It’s a doo-dad you can use to index a hash! That’s probably the most accurate way to describe it because that is unfortunately true of all 4 values. Unfortunate because for two of the values, it makes no absolutely sense to do that — but at least it’s true, so we’re getting somewhere. At the end of the day, though, I think all you can really say of Side is “it’s an enum and it’s up to clients to figure out what to do with it.” And that, my friends, makes it a bad abstraction.

Here are some other enums that would be poor abstractions

public enum Stuff
{
    Grape,
    Twelve,
    Microwave,
    Restart,
}

public enum CardSuit
{
    Spades,
    Hearts,
    Diamonds,
    Clubs,
    Black,
    Red,
    NoCard
}

public enum Dance
{
    Foxtrot,
    Tango,
    Waltz,
    DoesntLikeToDance,
    Miscellaneous
}

If you’re going to use enums, they ought to be values that are mutually exclusive, constitute a complete set, and form a clear abstraction. The first one is obviously nonsense, but the second two are enums where the person writing/extending them is about to get cute. They’re about to take an enum that has a set of mutually exclusive values and reappropriate it to use as a flag to tell their client code how to behave. Think of the code that’s about to be written — things like “if the suit is black, then do it for spades and clubs” and “if the person passed in has favorite dance property set to doesn’t like to dance…”

If you find yourself doing these kinds of cute things ask yourself what you’re really trying to accomplish. In the suit case, wouldn’t it make more sense to parameterize a method so that you could pass in multiple suits for the client code to operate on, instead of hard-coding the iteration? In the dance case, maybe it’s time for dance to be a first class object so that a “FavoriteDance” property can be set to null or a null object.

In C#, enums are already pretty much screaming “hey, there’s something called polymorphism — use that instead of me!” Once you start adding cute, one-off flag encodings to them, you’re really dropping all pretense of enumeration being a suitable abstraction and going for the gusto with fake, procedural polymorphism forced on your clients. Please, for your sake and mine if we later work together, don’t do that. The world doesn’t have a “class reserve” ala oil that may be exhausted someday — make a class. You won’t regret it because you won’t be spending your weekends upgrading The Cute.

3 Comments
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dave falkner
dave falkner
9 years ago

You can save a bunch of time by just adding all possible enum values for your entire domain to a single enum declaration, and then mark it with the “Flags” attribute.

dave falkner
dave falkner
9 years ago
Reply to  dave falkner

I hope you don’t mind me copying off of your Twitter shtick. I’m so desperately jealous that I didn’t come up with the idea first. 🙂

Erik Dietrich
9 years ago
Reply to  dave falkner

lol… I don’t mind at all. Enough satire around Expert Beginners, and maybe people will stop turning into them.