Turning Implicit into Explicit | #72

An implicit understanding is anything a skilled geek would have to be told before being set loose in your codebase to make a change. Implicit understandings take lots of different forms, but at their simplest, they often involve hidden correlations. Probably the most common form of implicit understanding is related to the smell we call primitive obsession. You'll see a series of methods, and each method takes the same three arguments, an int for the ID, a string for the descriptor, and a decimal for the amount, let's say. Those three arguments are actually correlated: together, they uniquely identify a line item on an invoice. But there's no "LineItem" thing. Instead, we just pass and pass and pass those three arguments. *We* know they're correlated, but the code doesn't *say* they're correlated. The fix here is pretty straightforward: Make a LineItem, and pass those instead. Now, my senior geek doesn't need to be told about that correlation, it's right there in the code. We have made our implicit understanding of the code into something direct and explicit.

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