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Long functions are fine when you read sequentially, but when enclosed in a loop you have to scroll back up to recover context about the loop and this is disrupt

Long functions are fine when you read sequentially, but when enclosed in a loop you have to scroll back up to recover context about the loop and this is disruptive. Carmack says it in the essay too > Enclosing pages of code inside a conditional or loop statement does have readability and awareness drawbacks

srtjstjsj 6y ago
Code folding solves this problem.
- roel_v 6y ago
  I've seldom found use for editor based code folding, and I've been trying to use it long enough to remember being excited when vim first got it (20+ years ago?). I mean I'm sure there are people who find it useful, but to me it's one of those 'nice on paper' things. I think it's mostly that you don't know how much is hidden away, and you don't get a feel for the balance of say the if then and the else part of a decision. I've been working on refactoring a 3000 line single function Fortran 95 program lately, with 6, 7, 8 levels deep loops and if/then etc; you'd think this sort of work would be the prime candidate for folding. In my experience it hasn't helped my understanding at all though. 'jump to matching brace' and 'search under cursor' along with keeping an eye on the scroll bar work much better for me.
  - juliendorra 6y ago
    Anecdotally it (psychologically) helps some of my beginners students in Processing (young designers), because they feel less overwhelmed by their code when it has started to grow over their comfort threshold. As beginners their brain isn’t used to selectively focus and block out the rest, so folding functions helps them focus. It’s also a good way for me to end the moment when I show them how to extract some code out of the Processing main loop function into a separate function, “now that we invented our own command we don’t need to look at it all the time … and we could also put it in a library…”.

srtjstjsj 6y ago

Code folding solves this problem.

roel_v 6y ago
I've seldom found use for editor based code folding, and I've been trying to use it long enough to remember being excited when vim first got it (20+ years ago?). I mean I'm sure there are people who find it useful, but to me it's one of those 'nice on paper' things. I think it's mostly that you don't know how much is hidden away, and you don't get a feel for the balance of say the if then and the else part of a decision. I've been working on refactoring a 3000 line single function Fortran 95 program lately, with 6, 7, 8 levels deep loops and if/then etc; you'd think this sort of work would be the prime candidate for folding. In my experience it hasn't helped my understanding at all though. 'jump to matching brace' and 'search under cursor' along with keeping an eye on the scroll bar work much better for me.
- juliendorra 6y ago
  Anecdotally it (psychologically) helps some of my beginners students in Processing (young designers), because they feel less overwhelmed by their code when it has started to grow over their comfort threshold. As beginners their brain isn’t used to selectively focus and block out the rest, so folding functions helps them focus. It’s also a good way for me to end the moment when I show them how to extract some code out of the Processing main loop function into a separate function, “now that we invented our own command we don’t need to look at it all the time … and we could also put it in a library…”.