On: Ask HN: coding challenges as part of interviews: y...

[raganwald]

I never use Ruby's case or switch or whatever-it's-called.

I could make up some mumbo-jumbo about case being a code smell and that it should actually be refactored to a method dispatch over polymorphic objects, but the truth is that I have no idea why I don't write case statements, I just don't.

[hugh → raganwald]

Add me to the "never uses switch statements" list. I've never seen the point in learning the syntax in any of the languages I know, since a bunch of else ifs (or elseifs, or elsifs, or elifs, depending on the language) does the same thing. If I waste a few keystrokes, but save a few brain cells, I think it's a worthwhile bargain.

Of course if I had to write that kind of construction often I'd probably learn the syntax of the case statement, but in the kind of work I do it hardly ever actually comes up.

[etal → hugh]

It's really just a performance optimization for C, in situations where the switching value can be hashed. In languages that make method dispatch easy, and the overhead of a function call is not something you're terribly concerned about, it makes sense to just roll your own as needed -- that's why Python never bothered with a switch statement.