I used to feel that way, but over time I've come to realize that for the vast majority of code pulling stuff out so you have only one level of nesting and only

I used to feel that way, but over time I've come to realize that for the vast majority of code pulling stuff out so you have only one level of nesting and only one pass/fail decision makes it easier to understand years later. I'm sure the compiler inlines a lot of stuff I pulled out. The exceptions to this are situations where you need to do a bunch of sequential steps and cases where you are looping on stuff in higher dimensions. I have gotten to the point that I consider a comment about the code to be a sign of trouble. (Comments about what the code is interacting with are a different matter.)