alt Hacker NewsThe author's point here is great, but the post does (imho) a poor job illustrating it.
The tl;dr on this is: stop sprinkling guards and if statements all over your codebase. Convert (parse) the data into truthful objects/structs/containers at the perimieter. The goal is to do that work at the boundaries of your system, so that inside of your system you can stop worrying about it and trust the value objects you have.
I think my hangup here is on the use of terms parse vs validate. They are not the right terms to describe this.
I understand where you're coming from, but these terms seem fine to me:
This is exactly what, for example, Rust's str::parse method is for. The documentation gives the example:
You will so very often have text and want typed information, and parse is exactly how we do that transformation exactly once. Whereas validation is what it looks like when we try to make piecemeal checks later.