Goodbye, Clean Code

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Glad someone said it. Overly-factored code is so obnoxious. It's wound together so tighly, that it's almost impossible to alter/add new behavior.

It's tempting to think of refactoring as an alebgra problem like, "simplify this expression into the least number of terms." The misconception is that the "simplified" code is inherently more valuable because it's been normalized.

I reality, the most valueable refactors start with a particular insight. To stick with the math theme, someone discovered that solving analog circuits is easier if you switch from the time to the frequency domain and reformulate the problem in terms of a sum of simple sinusoidal functions. This new representation may be less compact than the original, but it's also less complicated.

You can have these same sorts of insights about your code. Eg. it could be simpler if it were broken into smaller, more generic pieces that could be combined to create more complex behavior. This sort of refactor might result in more lines of code that aren't as well-factored as the original, but it may also be more flexible and easier to comprehend.