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Comment by SoftwareMaven | Hacker News Reader

Having gone through a couple thousand lines of Javascript that adhered to the "keep methods small", I call bollocks on that. Make methods as big as they need to be.

    function doFooOnList(l) {
        for (var i=0; i<l.length; i++) {
            doFoo(l[i]);
        }
    }
    function doFoo(i) {
        i.foo();
    }

gets old, very quickly.

After designing and building code for 20+ years, I can comfortably say that there are no arbitrary rules of software design, and some of the worst code I've seen has been a result of following "best practices" instead of thinking for oneself.

Write code like it is meant to be read, because that's what happens most often.

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> Make methods as big as they need to be.

Correct, and if you do that, methods will invariably end up small. What you cite above is small no matter how you write it, so that's not the point of the advice to keep methods small. Methods pretty much never need to be long; they're long because they're poorly written code. Well written code tends towards small methods.

"Small" obviously depends on your language, but well-named methods which follow the "do one thing and do it well" principle always win over wall-of-text code. It's all a matter of decomposing the issue, finding the level of abstraction your method will work at, and naming things.

We agree completely.

Correct, and if you do that, methods will invariably end up small.

If you'd said "usually", I'd have agreed with you, but "invariably" is far too strong. Sometimes the logic you need to implement is fundamentally complicated, and so the code you write to implement it must inevitably be at least that complicated. If that means writing a 100 line function, but the function really is doing one job, at one level of abstraction, in a cohesive way, then so be it.

We agree, I'm fine with usually.

some of the worst code I've seen has been a result of following "best practices" instead of thinking for oneself.

Very very true. This phrase suggests there is no better way to do something, and that it should always be used because it is "best", and the dogmatic application of rules replaces actual thought and understanding. I am not against a "recommendation" or "suggestion", but to call it "best practice" is cargo-cult-like.

`for (var i=0; i<l.length; i++)` is so 1970. In Javascript, you have array.map and $.each, and can define functions in-place.

Same applies to Python, BTW; get used to list comprehensions and generators and you cannot look back.

These aren't supported everywhere in javascript.

jQuery or underscore provide them on every sane JS platform. These are not hard to write by hand, too.

I'd say methods should be small enough so that their intent is clear. Usually it means that methods should have exactly one responsibility, otherwise they seem bloated.

You are calling bollocks on a claim he doesn't make.

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