Comment by jerf

Comment by jerf a day ago

Cyclomatic complexity may be a helpful warning to detect really big functions, but the people who worry about cyclomatic complexity also seem to be the sort of people who want to set the limit really low and get fiesty if a function has much more than a for loop with a single if clause in it. These settings produce those code bases where no function anywhere actually does anything, it just dispatches to three other functions that also don't hardly do anything, making it very hard to figure out what is going on, and that is not a good design.

BurningFrog a day ago

I call this "poltergeist code". Dozens of tiny functions that together clearly does something complex correctly, but it's very hard to find where and how it's actually done.

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Brian_K_White a day ago

One incomplete but easy to state counter "rule" to fling back in such cases is just: If the function isn't generic and re-used for other unrelated things, then it probably shouldn't be a seperate function.
Yeah only probably, there can sure be large distinct sub-tasks that aren't used by any other function yet would improve understanding to encapsulate and replace with a single function call. You decide which by asking which way makes the overall ultimate intent clearer.
Which way is a closer match to the email where the boss or customer described the business logic they wanted? Did they say "make it look at the 3rd word to see if it has trailing spaces..."?
Or to find out which side of the fuzzy line a given situation is falling, just make them answer a question like, what is the purpose of this function? Is it to do the thing it's named after? Or is it to do some meaningless microscopic string manipulation or single math op? Why in the world do you want to give a name and identity to a single if() or memcpy() etc?

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zellyn a day ago

I love that name, and will definitely steal it!

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