New feature in IntelliJ

In the User Interface in the new version of IntelliJ¹, version 2016.3², a new feature popped up called "Parameter hints"³.

My colleague at work has some strong feelings about it.

He feels that the feature provides the lazy programmer with an excuse not to provide properly typed parameters in a method definition (too many String/Boolean/Long and not enough OrderedItem for example). It also would allow the lazy programmer to create methods with 5 parameters or more, as the IDE helps you identify what they are.

Uncle Bob⁴ mentions that anything over three requires some serious soul searching.

My colleague and I both feel that a few of the methods in our software are suffering from an excess of parameters. Even worse, that a lot of these parameters are Booleans that function as switches to alter the behaviour of the method in some way. A code smell, to be sure.

Some solutions, although this blog post does not actually focus on it, is using either a configuration object that contains the parameters⁴ or perhaps a builder.

References

[1] IntelliJ IDEA the Java IDE

https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/

[2] What's New in IntelliJ IDEA 2016.3

https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/whatsnew/

[3] Parameter Hints in IntelliJ IDEA 2016.3 - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfYOddEmaRw&feature=youtu.be

[4] Clean Code, page 40

Robert C. Martin

[5] Introduce parameter object

https://sourcemaking.com/refactoring/introduce-parameter-object