This blog post titled, Small Functions considered Harmful, by Cindy Sridharan addresses one of canonical principles in modern computer science - small functions. As she points out below:
"The
idea is simple — a function should only ever do one thing and do it
well. On the face of it, this sounds like an extremely sound idea, in
tune, even, with the Unix philosophy.
The
bit where this gets murky is when this “one thing” needs to be defined.
The “one thing” can be anything from a simple return statement to a
conditional expression to a piece of mathematical computation to a
network call. As it so happens, many a time this “one thing” means a
single level abstraction of some (often business) logic."
This is a long blog post, but it is well written and for anyone who has written code, it challenges some of the principles.
