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I'm talking about the case where you have these two functions:

    def func1():
      ...
      A()
      B()
      C()
      ...  

    def func2():
      ...
      A()
      B()
      C()
      ...
Which is then refactored to

    def func1():
      ...
      ABC()
      ...  

    def func2():
      ...
      ABC()
      ...  

    def ABC():
      A()
      B()
      C()
Which is sensible, but then other functions show up:

    def func3()
      ...
      A()
      C()
      ...
And you refactor to:

    def func1():
      ...
      ABC(True)
      ...  

    def func2():
      ...
      ABC(True)
      ...  

    def func3()
      ...
      ABC(False)
      ...

    def ABC(doB):
      A()
      if (doB):
        B()
      C()
I'll leave the final example to your imagination, since I've already used so much screen space.

I'm currently in the process of undoing a lot of such refactorings in my codebase because it has become unmanageable.

I really think repetitive code is much easier to work with than overabstracted code.



I think the main problem is lack of expressiveness (what does True mean?). Since your examples seem to be in Python, I would solve it there with named parameters, maybe even giving them default values. That way the code may be abstract, but it is also informative.




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