Extracting methods for readability (or not)

I was recently involved in yet another discussion at work on the topic of extracting methods from larger methods just for readability. Just like I identified before it seems to be a trust issue; you don't trust that a method does what it says it does. We have to respect that people have different preferences but I started to think if the both extremes are really equivalent making it only a preference issue. This is what I came up with.

The benefit of breaking a large method up just for readability is that those extracted methods may actually be reused in the future. Another benefit is that when you look at any given method it is short and simple. If I remember correctly the human brain can hold around seven things in memory. So in order to remember large amounts of data we group data. The typical example is remembering a sequence of numbers. If you try to remember the sequence 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 as individual numbers it will take ten "memory blocks" in your brain which is probably more than you can handle. So instead you'll group the numbers and remember 123, 456, 789, 10 and the fact that the first numbers should be split up. That only takes up five memory blocks. Since it's actually a sequence you will probably even optimize this into just one memory block; "a sequence from one to ten". I think breaking up your larger methods into smaller methods achieves the same thing. This means that if you don't know what a method that is being called does you can always look it up and from that moment it is only one memory block for that whole function. So even if you think breaking up large methods is worse for you, when you try to understand something that is broken up it should be fairly easy to follow the flow with today's IDEs.The opposite however is not true I think. A large method have to be broken up into blocks by the reader every time regardless of if that is your preferred way or not. In this case you never get any help to break the method down into smaller pieces that are easier to understand.

This however does not mean that you should always break methods up I think. The litmus test is that if you extraction of methods means you end up with a lot of methods that have a lot of arguments. In my opinion such an extraction will not improve readability of your code. Does that mean you should keep the method? Well actually I think this is a sign of something larger being wrong so you need to rearrange things more because every method extracted should be an improvement.

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• Anonymous
  May 30, 2011
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• Anonymous
  May 31, 2011
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