I worked with an engineer that wrote the most clear and elegant linear code. It was remarkable, never seen anything like it since. I can't reproduce it but I do have an idea of what a well designed linear function looks like.. a story.
I was just thinking that if I _needed_ to refactor this I might structure the stages as chapters in a book. One might be able to write an inner class or some such that had a “table of contents” function that called each stage in sequence as a void function with data managed out of line, maybe via cleverly designed singleton structs. Then the code itself can be written in order with minimal boilerplate between stage boundaries.
I think I’ve worked with some Python that looked and worked this way. I can’t place the details but probably in a processor pipeline running over a particularly hairy data format. Consider ancient specifications written by engineers talking on the phone encapsulated in relatively “modern” but still vintage specifications, sometimes involving screen-scraping a green screen mainframe terminal, wrapped in XML and sent over the internet. Anyway, point is I couldn’t agree more about stories.
I will agree that it takes some skill, not that I am great at it. It's a different kind of skill than abstraction. Reading error handling in c code offered good insights for me to learn linearity better (c code that uses goto to jump to the end of a function for cleanup when an error occurs, for example).
However, if you screw up linear code, you screw up locally. If you write poor small functions, the rest of the team screws up because they barely ever read the contents of your functions that call other functions that call other functions. I've had way more problems with stuff being called slightly out of order, than with large functions.
