Re:The Economics of Clean Code
by Silhouette on Tuesday February 11, 2020 @03:12PM
(#22302284)
To take a prime example, short functions are almost always better than long functions.
This is a popular claim in some circles, but I don't think it stands up to scrutiny.
As others have observed, while you may gain locally through having simpler individual functions, you may also lose globally because you now need to manage the complexity of how all those functions relate.
There seems to be very little evidence to support the argument that shorter functions are objectively better, and if anything the evidence we do have suggests that extremely short functions are objectively worse in terms of things like defect density.
I would rather argue that functions should do one thing well. This will tend to correlate with shorter functions rather than 100+ line behemoths, but the important thing is that a function represent a single, coherent idea. Maybe that idea can be expressed as some neat one-liner in a functional programming language. Maybe it's some 200+ line ordered sequence of conditions that systematically determines how to shift between states in a state machine that is modelling a fundamentally complicated situation.
This is a popular claim in some circles, but I don't think it stands up to scrutiny.
As others have observed, while you may gain locally through having simpler individual functions, you may also lose globally because you now need to manage the complexity of how all those functions relate.
There seems to be very little evidence to support the argument that shorter functions are objectively better, and if anything the evidence we do have suggests that extremely short functions are objectively worse in terms of things like defect density.
I would rather argue that functions should do one thing well. This will tend to correlate with shorter functions rather than 100+ line behemoths, but the important thing is that a function represent a single, coherent idea. Maybe that idea can be expressed as some neat one-liner in a functional programming language. Maybe it's some 200+ line ordered sequence of conditions that systematically determines how to shift between states in a state machine that is modelling a fundamentally complicated situation.