Comment by Cliff Rowley on "Code optimization vs readable code"

To add to what Gergely Polonkai said, I would also add that you should probably start by questioning why you want to separate things into separate methods anyway. Sometimes it makes sense to, but more often it's actually more of a burden and you are making your code harder to follow at higher level. Sometimes you really shouldn't separate things out - business logic for example becomes difficult to manage if it's spread too thinly and dotted around in different places.

You want to separate things because you can have a method process($products) and another one doSomething($products) and most likely there will also be doSomethingElse($products). Also, it helps to be able to have code between doSomething($products) and doSomethingElse($products). And when you call the doSomethingElse($products), most of the times you get to save the process iteration, and if you have multiple conditional processing, you end up with a cleaner code and easier to maintain. You can also extract all those types of things in some sort of config for different classes of items and you can change the order of things a lot easier. Especially if those doSomething calls are long calls, for generating files, sending notifications, computing complex things. Imagine you need to create some pdf files and send emails for some of the products, but not for all. It may not be the same type of email or PDF. Having this type of extraction, all you need to do is call the right method on processed data and it all works just fine. The extra "n" steps of iteration are nothing compared to the number of steps in making a file or sending an email or publishing things to rabbit, calling some api or whatever. Not to mention the fact that exception handling becomes a lot easier if you have the type of processing separated.

Ovidiu Bădiță

Especially if those doSomething calls are long calls

Did you do benchmarks? Please, first do benchmarks and find out if they really are long calls and if they really are bottlenecks in that situation. Do not optimize prematurely!

Ovidiu Bădiță with that kind of separation I would consider an entirely different process anyway, perhaps handing off to a background task worker or such. The point of what was saying was really that there is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question and that the level of abstraction you employ is entirely contextual and makes more sense in some places than others.

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