[hinkley]

You should reread “Refactoring”.

Refactors compose. In three months you can completely rearchitect a module without breaking it at any point in the process. That’s the promise of refactoring.

Functions don’t have an identity. There is no such thing. I don’t know who taught you that but they have broken you in the process. Renaming things is a refactoring. We don’t check the entire commit history to make sure that function name has never existed. Only that it hasn’t existed recently. There’s no identity.

One of the reasons to refactor is that the function has been lying about its responsibilities. So you extract steps out of it, create a new call path that fixes the discrepancy, migrate the call sites, delete the incorrect function, and then, if the function name was really good, you might wait a while and rename the new function to the old name. Each step makes sense if you’ve followed the entire process. If you haven’t been following along at all then you have absolutely no idea how things got here until you read the git history thoroughly, which some people can’t do, and others won’t do if they expect the code to be static.

[randomdata]

> You should reread “Refactoring”.

With respect, you should reread the comment chain. You're clearly just repeating what has already been said.