Is it good practice to often use instanceof?

Question

The scenario. I\'m writting game-related code. In that game a Player(its also a class) has a list of Item. There are other types of items that inhe

Answer 1

IMHO using instanceof is a code smell. Simply put - it makes your code procedural, not object oriented. The OO way of doing this is using the visitor pattern.

The visitor pattern also allows you to easily build decorators and chain of responsibility on top of it, thus achieving separation of concerns, which results in shorter, cleaner and easier to read and test code.

Also do you really need to know the exact class ? Cant you take advantage of polymorphism ? After all Axe IS a Weapon just as Sword is.