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That's exactly what I meant by nuance, because the refactor into a function could never predict that 6 months down the line that specific function needs to be e

by piva00 3y ago

That's exactly what I meant by nuance, because the refactor into a function could never predict that 6 months down the line that specific function needs to be expanded, and someone might decide to delegate the call to another place. And the mess starts from trying to not repeat some code. Sometimes I avoided extracting a function out of some duplicated code because I intuitively saw that they had some potential divergence down the line, and it has paid off quite a few times. That's part of the problem as well, it depends on wisdom and intuition only gained through experience.

Maxatar 3y ago
So expand upon it, functions trivially compose unlike classes. There is nothing about deduplicating a function that prevents you from diverging from it later on. There could be some judgement calls and technical expertise needed to determine the right amount of parameterization of a function, but I'm not sure I follow the idea that a simple function, which is nothing more than a "name(parameters...)" that needs to be changed 6 months down the line is somehow causing a giant mess. If anything, the benefit of deduplicating is that if you find there is a bug in your implementation, or an optimization, you can fix the bug or apply the optimization in one place and get the benefit at multiple call sites, as opposed to having to go to a bunch of places. With that said, it's not my position to tell you not to repeat yourself. If you find repeating code helps you for whatever reason, go for it. I'm just saying that it's perfectly fine for developers to avoid repeating themselves by using functions and their code won't become a giant mess as you seem to indicate it will. Functions are very simple, flexible, and elegant abstractions for code reuse and even if you somehow found that you had to eliminate a function and repeat it in multiple places, that's a trivial operation to perform that most IDEs can do, so it's not like you're locked into this. The same can not be said if you use a class as a way to avoid repetition.

by piva00 3y ago

Maxatar 3y ago

So expand upon it, functions trivially compose unlike classes. There is nothing about deduplicating a function that prevents you from diverging from it later on. There could be some judgement calls and technical expertise needed to determine the right amount of parameterization of a function, but I'm not sure I follow the idea that a simple function, which is nothing more than a "name(parameters...)" that needs to be changed 6 months down the line is somehow causing a giant mess. If anything, the benefit of deduplicating is that if you find there is a bug in your implementation, or an optimization, you can fix the bug or apply the optimization in one place and get the benefit at multiple call sites, as opposed to having to go to a bunch of places. With that said, it's not my position to tell you not to repeat yourself. If you find repeating code helps you for whatever reason, go for it. I'm just saying that it's perfectly fine for developers to avoid repeating themselves by using functions and their code won't become a giant mess as you seem to indicate it will. Functions are very simple, flexible, and elegant abstractions for code reuse and even if you somehow found that you had to eliminate a function and repeat it in multiple places, that's a trivial operation to perform that most IDEs can do, so it's not like you're locked into this. The same can not be said if you use a class as a way to avoid repetition.