An Old Trick in a New Context
It’s easy – maybe too easy? – to bring old tricks into a new daily routine. The first Clojure code I wrote doesn’t particularly resemble what I write today. In this blog post, I briefly write about one of the things I’ve gradually unlearned.
Many Small Functions
It’s been a few years now, but I learned from an old uncle that one must break code up into many small functions. This made the code easier to understand, and the function names helped document the code.
I don’t think it’s such a bad idea. I still use function names as documentation instead of comments. However, I’ve discovered that this tip doesn’t hold up as well in Clojure.
Let me demonstrate. What does this code snippet do?
(decrease-player-health game)
It certainly looks like it reduces the health of the player in game. I know
this because I assume the function is well-named. We can certainly stick to that
assumption. Functions change, can be poorly named, etc., but that’s not my point
here.
Let’s say the function is implemented like this:
(defn decrease-player-health [game]
(update game :player decrease-health))
Ah, look here, this seems correct. :player in game is updated with the
decrease-health function. We can assume it’s also well-named, or we can click
further to its definition:
(defn decrease-health [player]
(update player :health dec))
Perfect. Now we know what our decrease-player-health function does. It updates
:health on :player by calling dec, a function that decreases a number by
one.
Many Small Building Blocks
Or was it perfect?
I had to read and understand two function names and navigate twice to verify that the functions did what they said on the tin. Naming is hard.
What happens if we inline the decrease-health function?
(defn decrease-player-health [game]
(update game :player #(update % :health dec)))
It looks a bit clumsy, but this form of nested updating can in Clojure be written as:
(defn decrease-player-health [game]
(update-in game [:player :health] dec))
And once that’s done, do we need the decrease-player-health function?
Instead of:
(decrease-player-health game)
isn’t it just as easy to read:
(update-in game [:player :health] dec)
?
No! It’s much easier - provided that I’m familiar with the building blocks in clojure.core. I don’t need to read and understand a name. I don’t need to navigate to the code to be sure.
In other words: When the building blocks are good enough, readability can be improved by avoiding named functions.
It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than 10 functions on 10 data structures.