It’s a matter of style, and like cooking, either too much or too little salt will ruin a dish.
In this case I hope nobody is proposing a single 1000-line god function. Nor is a maximum of 5 lines per function going to read well. So where do we split things?
This requires judgment, and yes, good taste. Also iteration. Just because the first place you tried to carve an abstraction didn’t work well, doesn’t mean you give up on abstractions; after refactoring a few times you’ll get an API that makes sense, hopefully with classes that match the business domain clearly.
But at the same time, don’t be over-eager to abstract, or mortally offended by a few lines of duplication. Premature abstraction often ends up coupling code that should not have to evolve together.
As a stylistic device, extracting a function which will only be called in one place to abstract away a unit of work can really clean up an algorithm; especially if you can hide boilerplate or prevent mixing of infra and domain concerns like business logic and DB connection handling. But again I’d recommend using this judiciously, and avoiding breaking up steps that should really be at the same level of abstraction.
In this case I hope nobody is proposing a single 1000-line god function. Nor is a maximum of 5 lines per function going to read well. So where do we split things?
This requires judgment, and yes, good taste. Also iteration. Just because the first place you tried to carve an abstraction didn’t work well, doesn’t mean you give up on abstractions; after refactoring a few times you’ll get an API that makes sense, hopefully with classes that match the business domain clearly.
But at the same time, don’t be over-eager to abstract, or mortally offended by a few lines of duplication. Premature abstraction often ends up coupling code that should not have to evolve together.
As a stylistic device, extracting a function which will only be called in one place to abstract away a unit of work can really clean up an algorithm; especially if you can hide boilerplate or prevent mixing of infra and domain concerns like business logic and DB connection handling. But again I’d recommend using this judiciously, and avoiding breaking up steps that should really be at the same level of abstraction.