Reading the comments in this thread is very interesting to me, because each programmer seems certain of the superiority of his own programming style.

We have some comments that disparage the change, saying that it obfuscates the code and makes it more difficult to understand.

We have others saying that this change is a basic technique and it's "shocking" that the author wrote a book without this simple knowledge.

What I take from this is yet another situation of people arguing about something highly subjective that is closely tied to their identity. Good programming is not an objective concept. People respond differently to different programming techniques and what works better for one person may greatly confuse another.

Novice programmer: Uses simple if/else.

Adept programmer: Discovers polymorphism. It's great, uses it for everything.

Master programmer: Realizes that in many cases, it makes the code less clear and more verbose, reverts back to if/else until the flexibility is actually needed.

Same story repeats itself many times on different fronts: metaprogramming, recursion, exceptions, macros, etc.