I do actually agree with him on that point - functions should do one thing. Though I generally disagree on what one thing is. It is a useless vague term and he tends to lean on the smallest possible thing a thing can be. I tend to lean on larger ideas - a function should do one thing, even if that one thing needs 100s of lines to do. Where the line of what one thing is, is a very hard hard idea to define though.

IMO a better metric is that code that changes together should live together. No jumping around lots of functions or files when you need to change something. And split things out when the idea of what they do can be isolated and abstracted away without taking away from the meaning of what the original function was doing. Rather than trying to split everything up in to 1-3 line functions - that is terrible advice.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, that’s an argument of semantics. I agree with you.

What I believe is that functions should do exactly what they advertise. If they do the things they’re supposed to do, but also do other things they’re not supposed to do, then they’re not minimal.

But I feel like Uncle Bob is leaning more towards that if a task requires 100 different operations, then that should be split into 100 different functions. One operation is one thing. Maybe not exactly, but that’s kind of vibes I get from his examples.

[–] nous 5 points 2 months ago

But I feel like Uncle Bob is leaning more towards that if a task requires 100 different operations, then that should be split into 100 different functions. One operation is one thing. Maybe not exactly, but that’s kind of vibes I get from his examples.

Oh yeah he defiantly does. He even says so in other advice like a function should be about 1-3 lines. Which IMO is just insane advice.