Hacker News Reader

Aside from the clickbait-y title, I find it quite disturbing to base that whole piece on, what even the author describes as, problems in "codebases inherited from folks who’d internalized this idea to such an unholy extent".

Indeed, small functions can be bad if you completely and utterly overdo it. But wait, that's true of nearly everything else.

View on HN

Yeah, the idea of small functions, and the overuse of DRY are separate.

Author of the article here.

Nope, the article doesn't conflate DRY and small functions. But the quest for DRY can lead to an explosion of small functions, which isn't necessarily a good thing.

The vice versa is true as well - many programmers, in their quest to make functions as small as possible, end up DRYing it up to the fullest extent as well.

There's a relationship between the two, but DRY and small functions aren't synonymous themselves, and neither does the article suggest that anywhere.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com