We learned loops back in school. But enumerators and iterators are the next generation.

TL;DR: Don't use indices while iterating. Prefer Higher level collections.

Problems

Solutions

Favor foreach() or high order iterators
You will be able to use yield(), caches, proxies, lazy loading and much more when you hide your implementation details.

for (i = 0; i < colors.count(), i++) {
  print(colors[i]);
}

foreach (color of colors) {
  print(color);
}

//Closures and arrow functions
colors.foreach(color => print(color));

Linters can find this smell using regex.

There might be false positives. See exceptions below.

If the problem domain needs the elements to be bijected to natural numbers like indices, the first solution is adequate.

Remember all time to find real world analogies.

This kind of smell do not ring the bell to many developers because they think this is a subtlety.

Clean code is full of this few declarative things that can make a difference.

If you get tired of writing for loops, take a break and continue later.

David Walker

Original twitter thread by Matt Moll

This article is part of the CodeSmell Series.

Last update: 2021/06/13