[mntmoss]

"Factoring" is sometimes used in the Forth world, since code being factored into small words is of such eminence.

And it offers good lessons about what's worth factoring and how. Forth words that are just static answers and aliases are OK! They're lightweight, and the type signatures are informal anyway. "Doing Forth" means writing it to exactly the spec and not generalizing, so there's a kind of match of expectations of the environment to its most devoted users.

On the other hand, in most modern environments the implied goal is to generalize and piling on function arguments to do so is the common weapon of choice, even when it's of questionable value.

Lately I've cottoned on to CUE as a configuration language and the beauty of it lies in how generalization is achieved while resorting to a minimum of explicit branches and checks, instead doing so through defining the data specification around pattern matching and relying on a solver to find logical incoherencies.

I believe that is really the way forward for a lot of domains: Get away from defining the implementation as your starting point, define things instead in a system with provable qualities, and a lot of possibilities open up.