Avoid conditionals

This seems like an impossible task. Upon first hearing this, most people say, “how am I supposed to do anything without an if statement?” The answer is that you can use polymorphism to achieve the same task in many cases. The second question is usually, “well that’s great but why would I want to do that?” The answer is a previous clean code concept we learned: a function should only do one thing. When you have classes and functions that have if statements, you are telling your user that your function does more than one thing. Remember, just do one thing.

Bad:

class Airplane {
  private type: string;
  // ...

  getCruisingAltitude() {
    switch (this.type) {
      case '777':
        return this.getMaxAltitude() - this.getPassengerCount();
      case 'Air Force One':
        return this.getMaxAltitude();
      case 'Cessna':
        return this.getMaxAltitude() - this.getFuelExpenditure();
      default:
        throw new Error('Unknown airplane type.');
    }
  }

  private getMaxAltitude(): number {
    // ...
  }
}

Good:

abstract class Airplane {
  protected getMaxAltitude(): number {
    // shared logic with subclasses ...
  }

  // ...
}

class Boeing777 extends Airplane {
  // ...
  getCruisingAltitude() {
    return this.getMaxAltitude() - this.getPassengerCount();
  }
}

class AirForceOne extends Airplane {
  // ...
  getCruisingAltitude() {
    return this.getMaxAltitude();
  }
}

class Cessna extends Airplane {
  // ...
  getCruisingAltitude() {
    return this.getMaxAltitude() - this.getFuelExpenditure();
  }
}