Give It a Name

The piece of code from the previous chapter is a doozy.

One of the main issues with long methods is that there's too much for your brain to process. There's too much going on; too much noise.

The quickest and most effective way to reduce this cognitive overload is by abstracting the main sections or ideas in our method into other smaller, more specific, methods.

Usually, we think about methods as a tool for sharing code. But that's not the main purpose of methods. The main purpose is that they help us to abstract parts of our code and give that code a more understandable label.

Note

Methods are not designed primarily as a mechanism to share code but as a way to abstract implementation details.

I'm going to show you the code example again, but with some added comments around where I think some natural seams for creating new methods might be:

public async processOrder(orderId: string): Promise<ValidationMessage> {
+   // This...