I recently suggested a method of chaining be implemented for a certain class in a certain project so readability of the code could be improved. I got a "fluent interfaces should not be implemented just for convenience, but for semantics" answer and had my suggestion shot down. I answered that I was not suggesting a fluent interface but method chaining itself (both can be confused with each other, read at bottom) to improve readability and coding comfort, suggestion was shot down again.
Anyhow, this got me thinking that maybe I could be incurring in a bad practice by always returning "this" in methods that are not supposed to return anything (e.g. setters).
My question is: can applying the previous convention be regarded as bad practice or abuse?, why?. I don't think there are any performance drawbacks, or are there?.
Best Answer
No
As Kent Beck points out, code is read far more often than it is written.
If method chaining makes your code more readable, then use method chaining.