in reply to Re: Old NumberCrunching Modules
in thread Old NumberCrunching Modules
I can't agree more with the tirade against monolithic functions that span several pages. A few months ago I was working on refactoring some code where many functions reached or exceeded around 200 lines. And as I began refactoring it was amazing how many places I found that I could generalize what five to fifteen lines were doing in a way that could be reused across several of those functions. The end result was fewer total lines, no functions beyond a single page, and in my opinion, easier to read and maintain (which was my motivation behind refactoring it -- I needed to maintain it and found it to be unmanageable without this sort of sprucing up).
My inspiration was derived from Schwern's Skimmable Code talk (PDF... sorry). I wanted to follow-up to your post to get that link out in the open once again; it's a great resource.
Dave