Code Smell 78 — Callback Hell
Processing an algorithm as a sequence of nested callbacks is not clever.
Published in
1 min readJun 11, 2021
TL;DR: Don’t process calls in a callback way. Write a sequence.
Problems
- Readability
- Hard to debug.
- Complexity
Solutions
1. Change callbacks to sequence calls.
2. Extract repeated Code
3. Refactor.
Sample Code
Wrong
Right
Detection
This problem shines at the naked eye. Many linters can detect this complexity and warn us.
Tags
- Readability
- Complexity
Conclusion
Callback Hell is a very common problem in programming languages with futures or promises.
Callbacks are added in an incremental way. There’s no much mess at the beginning.
Complexity without refactoring makes them hard to read and debug.
Relations
There are two ways to write code: write code so simple there are obviously no bugs in it, or write code so complex that there are no obvious bugs in it.
Tony Hoare
This article is part of the CodeSmell Series.
