Sean, I agree that breaking things into smaller functions can potentially help. Often, though, I find that a function begins by unpacking and computing a large number of values that are all important for subsequent computations. Dispatching these computations to helper functions would mean passing an unwieldy number of variables. One option is to have the helper functions inside the main function, inside the scope of these bound variables so that they don't have to be passed explicitly. But this potentially means several levels of nesting to bind the variables to their appropriate values (possibly testing for nil and other such conditions before computing further values), and then yet another level of nesting to create the helper functions (possibly with letfn, which is poorly indented by most of the IDEs last I checked). In such scenarios, decomposing into inner helper functions might actually exacerbate the problem of deeply nested and therefore highly indented code.
It would be interesting to run a scan of public Clojure code to get a sense for the average nesting level, indenting level, and the average line width. I'd be curious as to how far off the norm my own code is, and how Clojure compares to other languages. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
