if and else. These two are the iconic duo, in programming. Tell a programmer an if and they will respond with else. It is the bread and butter, the building block of a programmer’s life. The next step after "hello world".

And that’s the issue.

Having to review quite a number of junior developers’ code, I’ve seen way too many undue usages of else and some times else if. It’s true, there are cases which warrant the use of else, but there are way more cases which don’t.

Let’s explore.

The use of if is to approach a flow happens sometimes, but not happening all the time.

Let’s take the classic fizzbuzz problem.

> Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100.
> But for multiples of three print "Fizz" instead of
> the number and for the multiples of five print "Buzz".
> For numbers which are multiples of both three and
> five print "FizzBuzz".

The naive solution is as such:

def foo(i):
  if i % 15 == 0:
    print("FizzBuzz")
  else if i % 3 == 0:
    print("Fizz")
  else if i % 5 == 0:
    print("Buzz")
  else:
    print(i)

Notice that there are quite a couple of else statements in there. From this snippet the three else are readable. But what if we increase the complexity of the code?

Instead of printing, we want to return the output, as well as when the value is a multiple of 3 we want to call function bar.

def foo(i):
  x = ''
  if i % 15 == 0:
+   bar()
    x = "FizzBuzz"
  else if i % 3 == 0:
+   bar()
    x = "Fizz"
  else if i % 5 == 0:
    x = "Buzz"
  else:
    x = i

  return x

Let’s go one more level of complexity. If the value is even and is not a multiple of 3 or 5, we want to negate the value of it.

def foo(i):
  x = ''
  if i % 15 == 0:
    bar()
    x = "FizzBuzz"
  else if i % 3 == 0:
    bar()
    x = "Fizz"
  else if i % 5 == 0:
    x = "Buzz"
+ else if i % 2 == 0:
+   x = -i
  else
    x = i

  return x

Here we have quite a few alterations done since we have first written down the first line of code. What we have achieved is usually what happens as your requirements change.

Notice that in order to fulfill our requirements of returning the data, we have created a local variable x in the first statement of foo.

And it was returned on the final statement of foo. Given that this is the first time you have seen this code, would you be able to confidently identify that x is not modified within the other scopes of if s and else ifs?

Let’s take a look at another approach. One without else, and using return on every if block.

def foo(i):

  if i % 15 == 0:
    bar()
    return "FizzBuzz"
  if i % 3 == 0:
    bar()
    return "Fizz"
  if i % 5 == 0:
    return "Buzz"
  if i % 2 == 0:
    return -i

  return i

This allows us to avoid creating a local variable and provides clarity. For instance, when you are tracing code, we are able to immediately observe the scope of the code! We don’t need to trace what happened to x before it was returned!