this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
599 points (97.9% liked)
Programmer Humor
32710 readers
89 users here now
Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Rules:
- Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
- No NSFW content.
- Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Your assumption that "using reflection means the code is wrong" seems a bit extreme, at least in .Net. Every time you interact with types, you use reflection. Xml and Json serialization/deserialization uses reflection, and also Entity Framework. If you use mocking in test you are using reflection.
We have an excel export functionality on our sites that uses reflection because we can write 1 function and export any types we want, thanks to reflection.
A good sense of "code smell" is one of the most valuable programming skills. I think your "probably" is justified: if you're doing X, you should look twice at how you're doing it. Maybe it's right, but usually it's not, so it's worth a pause and a thought.
huh, you’re right! I’m trained on a different kind of code. In C# in particular, which I use mostly to do sneaky stuff (patch/inject runtime code to, um, “fix” it) and when I see a project that it’s too clean it smells
I also see python code (I code regular stuff in it) that could be written much more cleanly using monkey-patching
Modern .NET is reducing dependence on reflection. System.Text.JSON and other core libraries have leveraged source generation to produce AOT + trim friendly, reflection free code. But yeah, it's not a taboo like say
dynamic, it's perfectly normal to use reflection in idiomatic C# code.