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Comment by xorcist | Hacker News Reader

Hard disagree on this. I read quite a bit of code for a living and one of my single biggest complaints about most codebases are trivial functions (or useless objects).

If your code does n operations in sequence, just list those operations. Don't hide them off somewhere.

Code that reads linearly is by far the easiest to read. At least when you are familiar with the language and idioms. It's like the difference between a novel and a choose-your-adventure book.

Modern IDEs help, but there's only so much they can do.

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My favorite rule is orthogonal to length. Functions should ideally be at one level of abstraction. If you are doing 100 things at a single level of abstraction, and it flows logically, then by all means, keep it togeather. But if in a high level protocol specification you, say, concatenate strings and describe the details of fetching from files etc, then it might be better to isolate those.

Of course, what exactly a level of abstraction depends on how you model, and personal opinion. But I find it a more useful starting point then "line count".

Yes, absolutely! A hundred line function can be trivial, and a oneliner can be complex. It has nothing to do with function length but how much complexity and dependencies they isolate.

What you say about specifications certainly rings true. In those cases the reader's preferred abstraction level is pretty much given.

> If your code does n operations in sequence, just list those operations. Don't hide them off somewhere.

In principle I agree. In practice, if your function needs to do more than say five things one after another then something has gone wrong. If you were sending a human a set of instructions on how to do something, that's the point where you'd start grouping them into logical "meta-steps" (e.g. prepare the ingredients, make the broth, prepare the meat, finish cooking the dish).

Chopping a 12-step function into 3 4-step functions without regard for what each step actually does will make it less readable, just like doing the same to a recipe, or putting paragraph breaks and full stops into a passage at random. But a single function that does a long sequence of things is a code smell in the same way as an overly long sentence; it's well worth looking for a way to logically group these steps into a structure that will help the reader understand.

Here's a counterargument to that: you have to read and understand those "trivial" functions only once and just assume they are correct and do what they do when you keep encountering calls to them.

> Modern IDEs help, but there's only so much they can do.

Exactly. In my experience (YMMV) 100% of the time the complaints about using "too many functions" (or similar) come from people who use poor tools or don't really know how to use them.

Speaking of IDEs, a cool feature would be automatic read-only inlining for short functions. Could probably help understanding what's going on in code with lots of calls.

Usually I’m not just reading other people’s code to understand it, I’m stepping through it while running it. In that case, if it is broken up by function, I get to put watches on interesting variables and step over functions and see the data change. If I see something interesting I can step into the function. With one big blob of code, I have to set breakpoints to skip over the non interesting parts.

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