> If you have a 4 line stanza that needs a comment to explain what it's doing then I'd suggest that needs breaking out into a function
I'm mostly in agreement, so I'm going to focus on my disagreement too! ;)
This view is pretty common in the ruby community. So much so that I think they take it too far at times. I sometimes find myself reading a class that could have been a single 24-line method but is instead one method with method calls, each of which calls 0-2 more methods.
This style is good for when I'm trying to quickly understand what that class is supposed to do - I just read the top-level method that looks like:
But it's terrible when I need to understand what that function is actually doing - eg to debug it or to find some underlying function call I'm looking for. I have to bounce all over the file to mentally reconstruct a linear sequence of code which could have just been one function with some headers.
Of course, this style is a reaction to impenetrable 500-line functions which are also terrible. I'd definitely prefer many small functions to that! I think it's a matter of judgement and experience to know whether some code is better as small stanzas with comments or small functions.
I'm mostly in agreement, so I'm going to focus on my disagreement too! ;)
This view is pretty common in the ruby community. So much so that I think they take it too far at times. I sometimes find myself reading a class that could have been a single 24-line method but is instead one method with method calls, each of which calls 0-2 more methods.
This style is good for when I'm trying to quickly understand what that class is supposed to do - I just read the top-level method that looks like:
But it's terrible when I need to understand what that function is actually doing - eg to debug it or to find some underlying function call I'm looking for. I have to bounce all over the file to mentally reconstruct a linear sequence of code which could have just been one function with some headers.Of course, this style is a reaction to impenetrable 500-line functions which are also terrible. I'd definitely prefer many small functions to that! I think it's a matter of judgement and experience to know whether some code is better as small stanzas with comments or small functions.