Too many imports spamming my code

Question

In my project I have a shapes package which has shapes I designed for my graphics program e.g Rectangle, Circle. I also have one or two more packages that have the

Answer 1

Yes, too many imports is a bad thing because it clutters your code and makes your imports less readable.

Avoid long import lists by using wildcards.

Kevlin Henney talks about this exact Stack Overflow question 27:54 into his presentation Clean Coders Hate What Happens to Your Code When You Use These Enterprise Programming Tricks from NDC London 16-20 Jan 2017

Answer 2

It's subjective and depends greatly on the circumstances. I sometimes bounce between the two.

It is a general good practice to be specific by default but it can also be higher maintenance. It's not a perfect rule. However being more specific (higher initial cost) will tend to reveal itself earlier through measurable or perceptible drag where as being lazy by default tends to manifest as a problem more adversely.

Over including of entire namespaces can create bloat and clashes as well as hide changes in structure but in certain cases it may outweigh the benefit.

To give a simple case:

I use a package with a hundred classes.

• What if I use one of its classes?
• What if I use all but one of them?

It's similar to the whitelist versus blacklist problem.

In an ideal situation the package hierarchy will subdivide package types enough to establish a good balance.

In certain systems I've seen people do the equivalent of import *. Perhaps the most horrifying case is when I saw someone do something similar to apt install *. Though it seemed clever so as to never have to worry about missing dependencies it imposed enormous burdens that far outweighed any benefit.

All things can be taken to the extreme. For example I could argue for the utility of imports as close to as needed but if we're going to do that why not just always use the fully qualified names all the time?

Problems like this are annoying as the low cognitive load of consistency is always preferable but when it comes down to it in various given circumstances you may need to play it by ear.

It's important to be proportionate. Doing something a thousand times to avoid something that happens one time, self presents and takes about as much effort to fix tends to result in a waste.

Different objectives may make "too many" imports a good thing. I have a custom JavaScript framework which would likely horrify many at a glance for its stacks of imports.

What's not immediately obvious is that this is part of a deliberate strategy.

• This allows it to be easy In being able to more cleanly package the code with all its specific dependencies and then transmit that over a network.
• Imports have a plug nature at build time to alternate dependencies for each given platform target.

This tends not to be as much as a problem for languages that are less dynamic and that do not suffer greatly (or at all) from the overhead excessively importing namespaces. The moral of this story is that import strategies can vary enormously but be valid for their given circumstances. You can only go so far in taking general approaches.

In each situation you will need to have your bearings and a sense of the lay of the land. If the import conventions and structure is causing a nuisance then it's necessary to narrow down the how and why. Too many imports may not be the result of a specific strategy but things such as packing too much into a single file. At the same time some files are naturally large and naturally require many imports.

Badly applied separation of concerns or organisation in failing to keep related things together can create a graph with grossly excessive edges where that can be reduced with greater organisation. To some degree it's not abnormal for code to be clustered by specific dependencies more so specific dependencies than the more general ones.

If a code base is well organised into a graph that is fairly close to optimal with neither excessive splitting, merging and minimal distance between things you will tend to find that even if being specific with imports the majority of cases will tend to stay within a reasonable size.