The pendulum has swung too far in the direction of class, function, cyclomatic complexity (and here, CRAP) and similar idiotic metrics.
This reminds me of a talk Sandi Metz did called "All the Little Things" where she covers the Gilded Rose kata. In the talk, she reworks her solution until there's almost nothing left showing the essence of the problem being solved.
The cyclomatic complexity metric is touted at each step as a proxy for goodness of design and removal of complexity. However, a weakness of the measure itself is that it doesn't account for the control flow indirection that happens through OO method dispatch itself.
At the same time, Kevlin Henney's talk called "Gilding the Rose" takes the same kata and arrives at a far more sane solution he works up to and reveals at the end.
Short functions used to be hot. Uncle Bob used to proselytize "The first rule of functions is that they should be short. The second rule of functions is that they should be shorter than that." Now emphasizing the benefits of longer functions is pretty trendy.
<a href="https://github.com/johnousterhout/aposd-vs-clean-code" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/johnousterhout/aposd-vs-clean-code
This industry is pretty idiotic sometimes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Reasonable cyclomatic complexity is useful (at least) for testability. No metric is perfect and no metric should be a primary goal, but it has its use, and if you read e.g. a bit of leaked Windows you certainly will understand why it matters (and not because it has a particularly low cyclomatic complexity...)
Of course if you introduce new methods of dispatch and do not take them into account into a metric, you end up with something less... precise? useful? But given the primary intent and why and how the metric was created this seems a pretty trivial observation.
Now I agree it is also retarded to attempt to get only very short functions or extremely low cyclomatic complexity everywhere (even if you try to adapt it to count new kind of dispatch), because the only effect that produce is that it moves the complexity in another more abstract place we are less well equipped to manage.
"Short functions used to be hot. Uncle Bob [...]": well yes, Internet and sometimes group of people inspired ultimately by Internet and group effects can be pretty idiotic, but honestly Uncle Bob ideology was never considered serious in actual studies, and it is now even widely recognized mostly bullshit. It is just a kind of tech influencer if you want. Computer science and/or software engineering has more serious branches, where cyclomatic complexity can have its use.
richardbarosky · · focus · HN ↗
This reminds me of a talk Sandi Metz did called "All the Little Things" where she covers the Gilded Rose kata. In the talk, she reworks her solution until there's almost nothing left showing the essence of the problem being solved.
The cyclomatic complexity metric is touted at each step as a proxy for goodness of design and removal of complexity. However, a weakness of the measure itself is that it doesn't account for the control flow indirection that happens through OO method dispatch itself.
At the same time, Kevlin Henney's talk called "Gilding the Rose" takes the same kata and arrives at a far more sane solution he works up to and reveals at the end.
Short functions used to be hot. Uncle Bob used to proselytize "The first rule of functions is that they should be short. The second rule of functions is that they should be shorter than that." Now emphasizing the benefits of longer functions is pretty trendy. <a href="https://github.com/johnousterhout/aposd-vs-clean-code" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/johnousterhout/aposd-vs-clean-code
This industry is pretty idiotic sometimes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
temac · · focus · HN ↗
Of course if you introduce new methods of dispatch and do not take them into account into a metric, you end up with something less... precise? useful? But given the primary intent and why and how the metric was created this seems a pretty trivial observation.
Now I agree it is also retarded to attempt to get only very short functions or extremely low cyclomatic complexity everywhere (even if you try to adapt it to count new kind of dispatch), because the only effect that produce is that it moves the complexity in another more abstract place we are less well equipped to manage.
"Short functions used to be hot. Uncle Bob [...]": well yes, Internet and sometimes group of people inspired ultimately by Internet and group effects can be pretty idiotic, but honestly Uncle Bob ideology was never considered serious in actual studies, and it is now even widely recognized mostly bullshit. It is just a kind of tech influencer if you want. Computer science and/or software engineering has more serious branches, where cyclomatic complexity can have its use.