Readability is important.

How to Design Function Parameters That Make Interfaces Easier to Use (1/3)

by Jonathan Boccara

From the article:

When you look at an function in an interface, 3 prominent things give you indications about how to use it: its name, its parameters and its return type. And when you look at a piece of code calling that function, it’s just its name and its function parameters.

We’ve already covered in details how to give good names to the components of your code. Now we’re going to examine how to design function parameters in a way that both your interfaces and the code that calls them are as expressive as can be.

Summed up in one sentence, you want to make the decision of what arguments to pass to your functions a no-brainer.

There are a lot of things to say about how to achieve this. So much so that you will find the contents broken down into 3 articles in order to make it easier to digest:

• Part 1: interface-level parameters, one-parameter functions, const parameters,
• Part 2: calling contexts, strong types, parameters order,
• Part 3: packing parameters, processes, levels of abstraction.

To support this series I’ve taken many examples from interfaces I’ve worked on, except that I’ve stripped out all domain aspects to make them both simpler and disclosable...