> In my experience functions (abstraction in general) often obfuscate code, because you cannot really see what they do without jumping to another place and breaking a flow of reading.
Already discussed in the post you are responding to: “unless the contents (rather than the purpose) of the block of code is likely to be important every time you read the containing bit of code, you make the containing bit of code more readable by extracting the block.”
> There are of course cases where factoring a piece of code into a function would make in more readable, but I cannot say this about any group of commented lines.
Also already addressed, e.g.: “Whether you can think of a clear name for the function is, IMO, part of the test for whether it is a logically coherent unit of work to abstract out to a function in the first place.”
> And a function requires a comment too.
Not necessarily. A function in the public interface of a module probably needs a doc comment or docstring, but we’re discussinf abstracting out a piece of functionality used once, so presumably this is to a private function in the same module, not part of the public interface of the module.
Already discussed in the post you are responding to: “unless the contents (rather than the purpose) of the block of code is likely to be important every time you read the containing bit of code, you make the containing bit of code more readable by extracting the block.”
> There are of course cases where factoring a piece of code into a function would make in more readable, but I cannot say this about any group of commented lines.
Also already addressed, e.g.: “Whether you can think of a clear name for the function is, IMO, part of the test for whether it is a logically coherent unit of work to abstract out to a function in the first place.”
> And a function requires a comment too.
Not necessarily. A function in the public interface of a module probably needs a doc comment or docstring, but we’re discussinf abstracting out a piece of functionality used once, so presumably this is to a private function in the same module, not part of the public interface of the module.