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Exakat Blog:
How many parameters is too many?
May 01, 2018 @ 16:55:47

In a new post to the Exakat blog they try to answer the question "how many parameters is too many" when it comes to the structure of the methods and functions in your application.

Now, that is a classic question, that is often a minefield for anyone writing an increasing long list of argument in a method, or simply trying to set up auditing tools.

Obviously, the answer is not immediate. Parameters may be needed, but on the other hands, currying functions allows to reduce the amount of parameter to one for every function. In between, probably exists a reasonable level that is a golden rule, and also very elusive. So, we decided to check the current practice in PHP code.

They started the research with some of PHP's own native functions that took in specific arguments, ignoring those that took an arbitrary number. Next they made a survey of 1900 open source projects to determine the common practice for parameters by function. The results showed that methods without at least one parameter were "less useful" and that a seemingly reasonable amount of parameters is 5. The post finishes with a spotlight of two they found during their research that had the most parameters: a generated class for database interaction and a dependency injection class.

tagged: parameters count statistics userland native function method results

Link: https://www.exakat.io/how-many-parameters-is-too-many/


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