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Comment by sweezyjeezy | Hacker News Reader

I agree, but also agree with the author's statement "It's very difficult to decide which module to put an individual function in".

Quite often coders optimise for searchability, so like there will be a constants file, a dataclasses file, a "reader"s file, a "writer"s file etc etc. This is great if you are trying to hunt down a single module or line of code quickly. But it can become absolute misery to actually read the 'flow' of the codebase, because every file has a million dependencies, and the logic jumps in and out of each file for a few lines at a time. I'm a big fan of the "proximity principle" [1] for this reason - don't divide code to optimise 'searchability', put things together that actually depend on each other, as they will also need to be read / modified together.

[1] https://kula.blog/posts/proximity_principle/

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> It's very difficult to decide which module to put an individual function in

It's difficult because it is a core part of software engineering; part of the fundamental value that software developers are being paid for. Just like a major part of a journalist's job is to first understand a story and then lay it out clearly in text for their readers, a major part of a software developer's job is to first understand their domain and then organize it clearly in code for other software developers (including themselves). So the act of deciding which modules different functions go in is the act of software development. Therefore, these people:

> Quite often coders optimise for searchability, so like there will be a constants file, a dataclasses file, a "reader"s file, a "writer"s file etc etc.

Those people are shirking their duty. I disdain those people. Some of us software developers actually take our jobs seriously.

One thing I experimented with was writing a tag-based filesystem for that sort of thing. Imagine, e.g., using an entity component system and being able to choose a view that does a refactor across all entities or one that hones in on some cohesive slice of functionality.

In practice, it wound up not quite being worth it (the concept requires the same file to "exist" in multiple locations for that idea to work with all your other tools in a way that actually exploits tags, but then when you reference a given file (e.g., to import it) that needs to be some sort of canonical name in the TFS so that on `cd`-esque operations you can reference the "right" one -- doable, but not agnostic of the file format, which is the point where I saw this causing more problems than it was solving).

I still think there's something there though, especially if the editing environment, programming language, and/or representation of the programming language could be brought on board (e.g., for any concrete language with a good LSP, you can re-write important statements dynamically).

Oops: important -> import

Indeed! The traditional name for the proximity principle is called "cohesion"[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohesion_(computer_science)

Not to pick on Rails, sorting files into "models / views / controllers" seems to be our first instinct. My pantry is organized that way: baking stuff goes here, oils go there, etc.

A directory hierarchy feels more pleasant when it maps to features, instead. Less clutter.

Most programmers do not care about OO design, but "connascence" has some persuasive arguments.

https://randycoulman.com/blog/2013/08/27/connascence/

https://practicingruby.com/articles/connascence

https://connascence.io/

> Knowing the various kinds of connascence gives us a metric for determining the characteristics and severity of the coupling in our systems. The idea is simple: The more remote the connection between two clusters of code, the weaker the connascence between them should be.

> Good design principles encourages us to move from tight coupling to looser coupling where possible. But connascence allows us to be much more specific about what kinds of problems we’re dealing with, which makes it easier to reason about the types of refactorings that can be used to weaken the connascence between components.

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