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Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

If the code was separated out into functions that are only ever called once, I'd find it harder to read.

Analysing code I'm not familiar with often consists of manually tracing through calls, producing documentation that inlines all the single use function calls.

Ideally function names act as shorthand for the body of the function, but if they only have one caller they have nothing to keep them honest. In older codebases, function names are as misleading as comments; semantic drift, special cases etc. mean you need to drill into them anyway.

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I agree with the gist of your post, but one positive about single use functions is that you can be explicitly clear about data visibility.

In this contrived example, you can tell that formatting a title is not affected by user preferences, but formatting the body is. (And additionally that formatting a body has no information about the other fields of an entry)

  def formatRssFeedEntries(userSettings: UserSettings, data: List[Entry]) {
    val titles = data.map(entry => formatTitle(entry.title))
    val bodies = data.map(entry => formatBody(entry.body, userSettings))
  ...
  }

I agree. Blocks can somewhat substitute with scoping effects, and that's what I do with my inlined docs - they're nested {} with plain text description of contents and mentions of key variables and functions, scope is useful.

Nested ifs in for loops, with lots of things going on here, I don‘t know but that‘s the definition of hard to maintain and to read code.

Plus the Hungarian notation and whitespaces are not helping either.

When there is a test class to accompany this thing it would maybe help to faster make sense of it. But that‘s still no fun.

Splitting it up and using functions to extract use cases would help tremdendiously.

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