Neels J Hofmeyr wrote:
> Re is_dir_empty() comment: When I last created function comments starting
> with "Helper for..." I was told that that's not really the desired way to
> go. We should rather have descriptive names / concise docs, and we should
> design functions to be re-used for a particular purpose, rather than
> "hiding" code in specialised helper functions. I came to agree with that :)
It was probably me that said that. One of my pet theories is that it's
good to write a helper function, but any function is helpful to the
design and understanding of a structured system if and only if it has a
purpose and an interface that are understandable by itself, in terms of
some concepts about the domain it's working in. Thinking of a function
as "just a helper" can sometimes lead us to take a random portion of
code from the caller and forget about providing a clearly defined subset
of the caller's functionality which might later be useful to another
caller.
- Julian
Received on 2010-02-22 13:18:24 CET