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> I'd only add that he notes overeager splitting of methods and classes makes code involved in a particular abstraction to be no longer in one place, leading de

> I'd only add that he notes overeager splitting of methods and classes makes code involved in a particular abstraction to be no longer in one place, leading developers to constantly jump around files, which makes it more difficult to understand the code and increases the chances of making bugs. Another way of describing this, that I ran across recently, is that this increases the cognitive load for developers working on the code, and cognitive load is one metric by which code can be measured as "good" or "bad". Things like excessive scrolling and switching between files increases cognitive load. So heavily-commented code can decrease cognitive load if the programmer can read the comments and the related code block at the same time and if the comments help to explain why the code exists the way it does. Or, heavily-commented code can increase cognitive load if the comments don't accurately describe the code, or if they're so verbose that the programmer has to scroll up and down to digest both the comments and the code together.

wreath 8y ago
> Another way of describing this, that I ran across recently, is that this increases the cognitive load for developers working on the code, and cognitive load is one metric by which code can be measured as "good" or "bad". Things like excessive scrolling and switching between files increases cognitive load. Actually that’s one the reasons why he advocates not splitting code (arbitrarily) in the book.
AstralStorm 8y ago
Scrolling is fixable by code folding. You've read and understood the part, now you can fold it. It takes some factoring discipline to not end up with a woven structure. Unlike a single use function, it does not have a name to remember and is in-place - and definitely is not shared so can be assumed to be safe to modify. Comments would be much nicer if we could still use column-based commenting which unfortunately is not usable in any modern IDE. Reading code and comments side by side tends to work much better than interleaving.

wreath 8y ago

> Another way of describing this, that I ran across recently, is that this increases the cognitive load for developers working on the code, and cognitive load is one metric by which code can be measured as "good" or "bad". Things like excessive scrolling and switching between files increases cognitive load. Actually that’s one the reasons why he advocates not splitting code (arbitrarily) in the book.

AstralStorm 8y ago

Scrolling is fixable by code folding. You've read and understood the part, now you can fold it. It takes some factoring discipline to not end up with a woven structure. Unlike a single use function, it does not have a name to remember and is in-place - and definitely is not shared so can be assumed to be safe to modify. Comments would be much nicer if we could still use column-based commenting which unfortunately is not usable in any modern IDE. Reading code and comments side by side tends to work much better than interleaving.