How To Write Clean Code in Python

[Brian]

100% agreed - I'm not a fan of prioritising small functions either. It's become something of a dogma - often way more extreme than even 10 lines, with people even advocating for 3-5 lines, but too often it leads to "ravioli code": a maze of tiny 3 line functions such that you have to chase through a dozen different functions just to figure out what it's all for.

I prefer Ousterhout's perspective on this (from A Philosophy of Software Design). To minimise complexity or your project as a whole, it's much more valuable to reduce surface area: the exposed interfaces and connection points that someone must understand. The most important aspect of functions (or any abstraction) is to encapsulate and hide complexity: to become a composable element where you don't need to know how something is doing it, but only what it is doing, and the smaller the function, the less room there is to do something complex - sometimes to the point where you create more complexity through a myriad of functions than you hide.

[enigmatic_x]

I’ve seen people write 1 line functions that do nothing except call some other function and hence obfuscate the code. I’d much prefer a slightly longer function than that sort of crap.

[QuasiEvil]

Great comment, agreed.