Cognitive Complexity

Cognitive Complexity is a measure of how difficult a unit of code is to intuitively understand. Unlike Cyclomatic Complexity, which determines how difficult your code will be to test, Cognitive Complexity tells you how difficult your code will be to read and comprehend.

A method's cognitive complexity is based on a few simple rules:

• Code is not considered more complex when it uses shorthand that the language provides for collapsing multiple statements into one
• Code is considered more complex for each "break in the linear flow of the code"
• Code is considered more complex when "flow breaking structures are nested"

Further reading

• Cognitive Complexity docs
• Cognitive Complexity: A new way of measuring understandability

This cop checks whether some constant value isn't a mutable literal (e.g. array or hash).

Strict mode can be used to freeze all constants, rather than just literals. Strict mode is considered an experimental feature. It has not been updated with an exhaustive list of all methods that will produce frozen objects so there is a decent chance of getting some false positives. Luckily, there is no harm in freezing an already frozen object.

Example: EnforcedStyle: literals (default)

# bad
CONST = [1, 2, 3]

# good
CONST = [1, 2, 3].freeze

# good
CONST = <<~TESTING.freeze
  This is a heredoc
TESTING

# good
CONST = Something.new

Example: EnforcedStyle: strict

# bad
CONST = Something.new

# bad
CONST = Struct.new do
  def foo
    puts 1
  end
end

# good
CONST = Something.new.freeze

# good
CONST = Struct.new do
  def foo
    puts 1
  end
end.freeze