Beyond Booleans: Improving Software Design
2025-08-28
This article argues against the overuse of booleans in software design. The author contends that many seemingly appropriate boolean values can be replaced with richer data types like datetimes and enums. Using booleans often leads to information loss and makes code harder to maintain. The author suggests carefully analyzing the underlying data meaning behind booleans and choosing more appropriate types, such as using datetimes to record event times and enums to represent statuses or types. Booleans are only justifiable as temporary variables for intermediate calculation results. This approach improves software design quality, prevents potential bugs, and enhances code maintainability and readability.
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