Okay, so today I’m gonna walk you through this little experiment I did, messing around with “elemental pruning” – sounds fancy, right? It’s really not. It all started with me just being bored and wanting to see if I could make my code a bit dumber, but in a smart way.
First off, I had this kinda chunky piece of code that I knew could be simplified. It was doing some stuff with, like, checking different conditions based on different “elements” – think of it like checking if something is fire, water, earth, or air, and then doing something different depending on what it was. The code was just a long string of if/else if/else statements. Ugly.
So, I started by just mapping out all the possible “elements” and what each one was supposed to do. Basically, I made a big ol’ table. This was key, because it forced me to really think about what the code needed to do, not just what it was doing. Turns out, some of the else if conditions were redundant, or just plain wrong.
Next, I tried to find some common ground between the different “elements.” Like, were there any actions that multiple elements did the same way? If so, could I pull that logic out of the if/else block and put it somewhere else? This is where the “pruning” came in. I was basically cutting away the dead weight.
What I ended up doing was creating a dictionary (or a map, or whatever your language calls it) that mapped each “element” to a function. So, instead of a giant if/else block, I just looked up the element in the dictionary and called the corresponding function. Way cleaner.
Here’s a super simplified example, imagine the original code looked something like this:
if element == "fire":
# do fire stuff
elif element == "water":
# do water stuff
elif element == "earth":
# do earth stuff
else:
# do air stuff
And after “pruning,” it became something like this:
element_actions = {
"fire": do_fire_stuff,
"water": do_water_stuff,
"earth": do_earth_stuff,
"air": do_air_stuff
element_actions[element]()
Obviously, that’s a really simple example. But the core idea is the same. The point wasn’t to make the code shorter, it was to make it more readable and maintainable. Plus, it made it way easier to add new “elements” later on. Just add a new entry to the dictionary, done.
The “joke” part? Well, after all that effort, the code ran, like, maybe a tiny bit faster. But honestly, the real benefit was just how much easier it was to understand and work with. So, it’s kind of a joke because I spent a bunch of time on something that didn’t have a huge performance impact, but it did make the code a whole lot better. And sometimes, that’s worth it, right?
Anyway, that’s my “elemental pruning joke.” Hope you got a chuckle, and maybe even learned something. Go prune your own code!
