Five Lines of Code

3 Shatter long functions

This chapter covers

• Identifying overly long methods with Five lines
• Working with code without looking at the specifics
• Breaking up long methods with Extract method
• Balancing abstraction levels with Either call or pass
• Isolating if statements with if only at the start

Code can easily get messy and confusing, even when following the Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) and Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS) guidelines. Some strong contributors to this messiness are as follows:

• Methods are doing multiple different things.

• We use low-level primitive operations (array accesses, arithmetic operations, etc.).

• We lack human-readable text, like comments and good method and variable naming.

Unfortunately, knowing these issues is not ...