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The worst version of this I've seen is when every layer is like four lines long. You step into a function expecting some logic and it's just calling another function with slightly different args. Do that six times and you forgot what the original call was even trying to do. Naming helps in theory but in practice half those intermediate functions end up with names like processInner or handleCore because there's nothing meaningful to call them.

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Any pattern executed robotically like this becomes a self parody.

One heuristic I use to avoid this exact problem is "minimize the number of places that the next poor soul has to look in order to understand how this code works", where place is loosely defined as about the number of lines of code that fit on a screen or two.

This has given really good results in terms of helping decide whether to extract these helper functions or not - they have to both be memorable enough in name and arguments that the code calling them can understand what's going on without always having to dive in, and also provide a meaningful compression of the logic above so that it can be comprehended without having to jump across many hundreds of lines.

It'd be great if IDEs can store a stack of functions currently being explored similar to what you get when debugging. Not breadcrumbs, but plain stack. Bonus points if you can store multiple stacks, and give them names according to the context.

Ah. I once worked in a team with a hard cyclomatic complexity cap of 4 per function. Logic exceeding the cap needed to be broken into helper functions. Many, many functions were created to hold exactly one if statement each. Well, the code was relatively high quality for other reasons, but I can't say this policy contributed much.

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