Code Smell 74 — Empty Lines
Breaking the code to favor readability asks for refactor.
Published in
1 min readJun 4, 2021
TL;DR Don’t add empty lines to your methods. Extract them!
Problems
- Readability
- Kiss
- Low Reuse
Solutions
1. Extract Method
2. Refactor
3. Remove unneeded lines.
Sample Code
Wrong
Right
Detection
This is a policy smell. Every linter can detect blank lines and warn us.
Tags
- Readability
- Long Methods
Conclusion
Empty lines are harmless, but show us an opportunity to break the code into small steps.
If you break your code with comments, it is also a code smell asking for a refactor.
Relations
It’s OK to figure out murder mysteries, but you shouldn’t need to figure out code. You should be able to read it.
Steve McConnell
This article is part of the CodeSmell Series.
