[blub]

I've managed to finish reading the chapter with the example refactoring from Fowler's book before putting it down as parody.

He's part of a design school that likes to pulverise code into tiny functions with the goal of having code that consists only of assignments and function calls, reading like instructions in English to the computer.

Whoever was indoctrinated by Robert Martin, Martin Fowler & co should read Ousterhout's design book for a fresh perspective on this.

The value of a book like "Refactoring" lies in naming the refactoring (e.g. extract function), but please don't listen to the design advice.

[Jach]

Thanks for the pointer to Ousterhout, I don't think I've heard of him before but a lot of the Tcl people have put out good stuff.

Uncle Bob and friends definitely form their own "school". I think they call the "functions and assignment" style "Newspaper style", since for them it's kind of like reading a newspaper. Following it you can actually get a long way towards the dream of "self documenting code". I'm happy when people who believe in some specific school of thought get it to work for them, and even if I disagree on things at least there's consistency.

It's still never as clear as a literate program, though. And while Uncle Bob has been upgrading by learning Clojure, a lot of that school's work has assumed OO-in-the-style-of-Java5/C++98 environments. And to be fair that's a lot of the mass of legacy code we unhappily get saddled with. I think their work is less applicable and there are other schools to listen to when you have different languages or programming methods (FP, declarative, OO with a MOP, etc.).

I read the Clean Code book finally not too long ago, and while I've never argued with a book so much, there is value in it, and some programmers would do much better than their current flailing to follow its approach exactly. But these guys aren't my personal programming heroes, I'd rather be like a Norvig than a Jeffries (even if the latter is a perfectly acceptable engineer). But I can usually find value in all their works; philosophically I'm aligned with Bruce Lee, I'll take what I think is valuable and discard the rest.

[teknopaul]

Re"pulverise code into tiny functions with the goal of having code that consists only of assignments and function calls"

You dont refactor so its "so small it becomes functional". You remove/refacor code with side effects where possible. So that part of the code becomes functional. It does not matter if a function is a lot of code or a little as long as it does not impact the world outside it.

A small function that adds two numbers and as a side affect assigns some global state is to be avoided however small the function.

"Fuctional programming" is not just about writing lots of functions