Thank you for posting this. I had similar feelings as I read the piece earlier.
I think the fundamental problem here is that if we put too much emphasis on trying to keep everything loosely coupled, we tend to lose the cohesion.
It’s all very well trying to separate our code into modules where each module has only one main responsibility. In fact, I’d say it’s probably essential if we’re going to stay sane working on any large project. But there is a flip side, which is that it’s useful to keep code that deals with the same responsibility, or related responsibilities, together.
If we take this to an extreme, as advocates of very short functions tend to do, then we wind up with examples like the tutorial code here. We started with a concise, easily understandable piece of code that we could all scan and understand in a few seconds. We wound up with a monster that is going to take anyone who didn’t write it much longer to get their head around. This is not an improvement.
The difficulty with tutorials is that they necessarily present relatively simple examples. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether the approach being advocated does go too far, or whether it just looks like it in the trivial case presented but in realistic code it would be reasonable.
I think the fundamental problem here is that if we put too much emphasis on trying to keep everything loosely coupled, we tend to lose the cohesion.
It’s all very well trying to separate our code into modules where each module has only one main responsibility. In fact, I’d say it’s probably essential if we’re going to stay sane working on any large project. But there is a flip side, which is that it’s useful to keep code that deals with the same responsibility, or related responsibilities, together.
If we take this to an extreme, as advocates of very short functions tend to do, then we wind up with examples like the tutorial code here. We started with a concise, easily understandable piece of code that we could all scan and understand in a few seconds. We wound up with a monster that is going to take anyone who didn’t write it much longer to get their head around. This is not an improvement.
The difficulty with tutorials is that they necessarily present relatively simple examples. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether the approach being advocated does go too far, or whether it just looks like it in the trivial case presented but in realistic code it would be reasonable.