Evan X. Merz

Side effects are any observable change to the state of an object. Some people might qualify this by saying that side effects are implicit or unintended changes to state.

Mutator methods, or setters, which are designed to change the state of an object, should have side effects. Accessor methods, or getters, should not have side effects. Other methods should generally try to avoid changing state beyond what is necessary for the intended task.

Why are these guidelines best practices though? What makes side effects so bad? Students have asked me this question many times, and I’ve worked with many experienced programmers who don’t seem to understand why minimizing side effects is a good goal.

For example, I recently commented out a block of my peer’s code because it had detrimental side effects. The code was intended to add color highlighting to log entries to make his debugging easier. The problem with the code was that the syntax highlighting xml was leaking into our save files. He was applying the highlight to a key, then using that key both in the log and in the save file. Worse still, he wrote this code so that it only occurred on some platforms. When I was debugging a cross platform feature, I got very unpredictable behavior and ultimately traced it back to this block.

This is an example where code was intended for one purpose, but it also did something else. That something else is the side effect, and you can see how it caused problems for other developers. Since his change was undocumented and uncommented, I spent hours tracking it down. As a team, we lost significant productivity due to a side effect.

Side effects are bad because they make a code base less agile. Side effects cause bugs that are difficult to find, and lead to code that is more difficult to maintain.

Before I continue, let me be clear that all code style guidelines should be broken sometimes. For each situation, a guideline or design pattern may be better or worse, and I recognize that we are always working in shades of gray.

Generally, a block of code should be written for one purpose. If it is a method, then it should do one thing. If another thing needs to be done with an object, then that should be encapsulated in another method.

Here’s a hypothetical example that I’ve seen played out hundreds of times in my career.

A class needs to do task X. A programmer may write a method to do task X, but he accidentally includes logic that also does task Y. Later, he may see that he needs to do task Y all alone. So he writes a method to do task Y. That’s where the problem is compounded.

Later still, the definition of task Y changes. So another programmer has to rewrite task Y. He goes to the class, changes the method for task Y alone, does a few quick tests, and proceeds on his merry way.

Then mysterious bugs start occurring. QA can’t really track them down to one thing because they only occur sporadically after task Y. Finally, it takes many man-hours to remove task Y from the method for task X.

In this example, the side effect led to code duplication, which led to trouble when updating the code, which led to bugs that cost many hours to track down. The fewer side effects you introduce, the easier your code will be to maintain.

These two examples show how side effects can derail development and why they are so inimical. We all write code with side effect occasionally, but it’s our job to figure out how to do it in a way that doesn’t make the code more difficult to maintain.