In my mind I contrast "keep it simple" with "make it simple". Successful "make it simple" is better than "keep it simple", which in turn is much better than fai

In my mind I contrast "keep it simple" with "make it simple". Successful "make it simple" is better than "keep it simple", which in turn is much better than failed "make it simple". Every attempt at "make it simple" is a wager. Regarding the one-caller method, beloved by followers of maximum method length ideology, scorned by enemies of excessive indirection, I think we lost a very useful tool when the "structured programming" of Pascal, which prominently featured nested functions as an organisation principle disappeared. It got steamrolled by OOP name scoping (which tends to be too big for this use case) from the top while the archaic "if it exists, it is accessible" of C firmly held the lower levels. The current trend of retrofitting functional features is technically getting us back what we lost, but the use of nested functions as a simple organisational tool is still far from idiomatic. E.g. in Java>=8, when you see a lambda assigned inside a method you expect something clever functional to follow, not a simple "I put this block of code in a box to give it a name, but it won't be meaningful outside this method".