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Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

Not only that, the purpose of refactoring isn't simply for reuse, but also for readability. If you break out chuncks that aren't reusable, but enhance the readability of the code then you've likely improved the code.

Given the choice between reusability and readability I'd say that readability should usually win (although it is a false choice).

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I would contend that if you're having code readability issues, it'd be better to fix it by sprucing up your whitespace and comments, instead of saying "Well, let's chunk it into more functions" and have method(), which returns method1(), which returns method2(), which returns method3()...

Chunking for the sake of itself doesn't seem like a viable strategy to me.

When you add a new-line or two into a section of code, you're usually saying:

"These two blocks of code do something different"

Thats what is normally called a method. If it's only for one class then by all means make it private and name it well, so the caller remains readable.

Chunking out in more functions is good in itself, because there's usually a well defined interface for what can get in and out of a function.

Whitespace and comments can suggest that some pieces of code don't interact that much, but chunking into functions lets the compiler prove it.

I agree that that strategy's pretty feeble, but IMO it's still better than e.g. a thousand-line function. If nothing else it forces you to break out the parameters explicitly, instead of just having a thousand lines of intermingled state transitions.

Fully agree and I want to add, that it is also a requirement for writing good, simple, small unit tests. Clean code means, a function should only do one thing and that's the thing you can test.

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