Stochastic rounding reemerges

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Just like integer types, floating-point types are capable of representing a finite number of numeric values. An important difference between integer and floating types is that the result of arithmetic and relational operations using integer types is exactly representable in an integer type (provided they don’t overflow), while the result of arithmetic operations using floating types may not be exactly representable in the corresponding floating type.

When the result of a floating-point operation cannot be exactly represented, it is rounded to a value that can be represented. Rounding modes include: round to nearest (the default for IEEE-754), round towards zero (i.e., truncated), round up (i.e., towards infty), round down (i.e., towards -infty), and round to even. The following is an example of round to nearest:

      123456.7    = 1.234567    × 10^5
         101.7654 = 0.001017654 × 10^5
Adding
                  = 1.235584654 × 10^5
Round to nearest
                  = 1.235585    × 10^5

There is another round mode, one implemented in the 1950s, which faded away but could now be making a comeback: Stochastic rounding. As the name suggests, every round up/down decision is randomly chosen; a Google patent makes some claims about where the entropy needed for randomness can be obtained, and Nvidia also make some patent claims).

From the developer perspective, stochastic rounding has a very surprising behavior, which is not present in the other IEEE rounding modes; stochastic rounding is not monotonic. For instance: z < x+y does not imply that 0<(x+y)-z, because x+y may be close enough to z to have a 50% chance of being rounded to one of z or the next representable value greater than z, and in the comparison against zero the rounded value of (x+y) has an uncorrelated probability of being equal to z (rather than the next representable greater value).

For some problems, stochastic rounding avoids undesirable behaviors that can occur when round to nearest is used. For instance, round to nearest can produce correlated rounding errors that cause systematic error growth (by definition, stochastic rounding is uncorrelated); a behavior that has long been known to occur when numerically solving differential equations. The benefits of stochastic rounding are obtained for calculations involving long chains of calculations; the rounding error of the result of n operations is guaranteed to be proportional to sqrt{n}, i.e., just like a 1-D random walk, which is not guaranteed for round to nearest.

While stochastic rounding has been supported by some software packages for a while, commercial hardware support is still rare, with Graphcore's Intelligence Processing Unit being one. There are some research chips supporting stochastic rounding, e.g., Intel's Loihi.

What applications, other than solving differential equations, involve many long chain calculations?

Training of machine learning models can consume many cpu hours/days; the calculation chains just go on and on.

Machine learning is considered to be a big enough market for hardware vendors to support half-precision floating-point. The performance advantages of half-precision floating-point are large enough to attract developers to reworking code to make use of them.

Is the accuracy advantage of stochastic rounding a big enough selling point that hardware vendors will provide the support needed to attract a critical mass of developers willing to rework their code to take advantage of improved accuracy?

It's possible that the intrinsically fuzzy nature of many machine learning applications swamps the accuracy advantage that stochastic rounding can have over round to nearest, out-weighing the costs of supporting it.

The ecosystem of machine learning based applications is still evolving rapidly, and we will have to wait and see whether stochastic rounding becomes widely used.

Deleted my Twitter account

Andy Balaam from Andy Balaam&#039;s Blog

This evening I deleted my Twitter account. I’m feeling surprisingly unsettled by doing it, to be honest.

The Twitter mobile interface showing that my account has been deactivated.

I can’t participate in a platform that gives a voice to people who incite violence. I said I would leave if Trump were re-instated, and that is what I am doing. I know Twitter has failed in the past in many ways, but this deliberate decision is the last straw.

I have downloaded the archive of my tweets, and I will process it and upload it to my web site as soon as possible.

You can find me at @andybalaam@mastododon.social.

If you’d like help finding your way onto Mastodon, feel free to ask me for help via Mastodon itself, or by email on andybalaam at artificialworlds.net

Some human biases in conditional reasoning

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Tracking down coding mistakes is a common developer activity (for which training is rarely provided).

Debugging code involves reasoning about differences between the actual and expected output produced by particular program input. The goal is to figure out the coding mistake, or at least narrow down the portion of code likely to contain the mistake.

Interest in human reasoning dates back to at least ancient Greece, e.g., Aristotle and his syllogisms. The study of the psychology of reasoning is very recent; the field was essentially kick-started in 1966 by the surprising results of the Wason selection task.

Debugging involves a form of deductive reasoning known as conditional reasoning. The simplest form of conditional reasoning involves an input that can take one of two states, along with an output that can take one of two states. Using coding notation, this might be written as:

    if (p) then q       if (p) then !q
    if (!p) then q      if (!p) then !q

The notation used by the researchers who run these studies is a 2×2 contingency table (or conditional matrix):

          OUTPUT
          1    0
   
      1   A    B
INPUT
      0   C    D

where: A, B, C, and D are the number of occurrences of each case; in code notation, p is the input and q the output.

The fertilizer-plant problem is an example of the kind of scenario subjects answer questions about in studies. Subjects are told that a horticultural laboratory is testing the effectiveness of 31 fertilizers on the flowering of plants; they are told the number of plants that flowered when given fertilizer (A), the number that did not flower when given fertilizer (B), the number that flowered when not given fertilizer (C), and the number that did not flower when not given any fertilizer (D). They are then asked to evaluate the effectiveness of the fertilizer on plant flowering. After the experiment, subjects are asked about any strategies they used to make judgments.

Needless to say, subjects do not make use of the available information in a way that researchers consider to be optimal, e.g., Allan’s Delta p index Delta p=P(A vert C)-P(B vert D)=A/{A+B}-C/{C+D} (sorry about the double, vert, rather than single, vertical lines).

What do we know after 40+ years of active research into this basic form of conditional reasoning?

The results consistently find, for this and other problems, that the information A is given more weight than B, which is given by weight than C, which is given more weight than D.

That information provided by A and B is given more weight than C and D is an example of a positive test strategy, a well-known human characteristic.

Various models have been proposed to ‘explain’ the relative ordering of information weighting: w(A)>w(B) > w(C) > w(D)” title=”w(A)>w(B) > w(C) > w(D)”/><a href=, e.g., that subjects have a bias towards sufficiency information compared to necessary information.

Subjects do not always analyse separate contingency tables in isolation. The term blocking is given to the situation where the predictive strength of one input is influenced by the predictive strength of another input (this process is sometimes known as the cue competition effect). Debugging is an evolutionary process, often involving multiple test inputs. I’m sure readers will be familiar with the situation where the output behavior from one input motivates a misinterpretation of the behaviour produced by a different input.

The use of logical inference is a commonly used approach to the debugging process (my suggestions that a statistical approach may at times be more effective tend to attract odd looks). Early studies of contingency reasoning were dominated by statistical models, with inferential models appearing later.

Debugging also involves causal reasoning, i.e., searching for the coding mistake that is causing the current output to be different from that expected. False beliefs about causal relationships can be a huge waste of developer time, and research on the illusion of causality investigates, among other things, how human interpretation of the information contained in contingency tables can be ‘de-biased’.

The apparently simple problem of human conditional reasoning over two variables, each having two states, has proven to be a surprisingly difficult to model. It is tempting to think that the performance of professional software developers would be closer to the ideal, compared to the typical experimental subject (e.g., psychology undergraduates or Mturk workers), but I’m not sure whether I would put money on it.

IETF115 Trip Report (Can Matrix help messaging standardisation through MIMI?)

Andy Balaam from Andy Balaam&#039;s Blog

Geeks don’t like to be formal, but we do like to be precise. That is the
contrast that comes to mind as I attend my first IETF meeting, IETF 115 in
London in November 2022.

Like most standards bodies, IETF appears to have been formed as a reaction to
stuffy, process-encumbered standards bodies. The introductory material
emphasises a rough-consensus style, with an emphasis on getting things done
and avoiding being a talking shop. This is backed up by the hackathon organised
on the weekend before the conference, allowing attendees to get a taste of
really doing stuff, writing code to solve those thorny problems.

But the IETF has power, and, rightly, with power come checks and balances, so
although there is no formal secretary for the meeting I was in, a volunteer was
found to take minutes, and they made sure to store them in the official system.
It really matters what happens here, and the motley collection of (mostly
slightly aging) participants know that.

There is an excitement about coming together to solve technical problems, but
there is also an understandable caution about the various agendas being
represented.

We were at the meeting to discuss something incredibly exciting: finding a
practical solution for how huge messaging providers (e.g. WhatsApp) can make
their systems “interoperable”. In other words, making it possible for people
using one instant messenger to talk to people using another one.

Because of the EU’s new Digital Markets Act (DMA), the largest messaging
providers are going to be obliged to provide ways for outside systems to link
into them, and the intention of the meeting I went to (“More Instant Messaging
Interoperability”, codenamed MIMI) is to agree on a way they can link together
that makes the experience good for users.

The hardest part of this is preserving end-to-end encryption across different
instant messengers. If the content of a message is encrypted, then you can’t
have a translation layer (“bridge”, in Matrix terminology) that converts those
contents from one format into another, because the translator would need to
decrypt the message first. Instead, either the client (the app on the user’s
device) needs to understand all possible formats, or we need to agree on a
common format.

The meeting was very interesting, and conversation on the day revolved around
what exactly should be in scope or out of scope for the group that will
continue this work. In particular, we discussed whether the group should work
on questions of how to identify and find people on other messaging networks,
and to what extent the problems of spam and abuse should be considered. Mostly
the conclusion was that the “charter” of the “working group”, when/if it
is formed, should leave these topics open, so that the group can decide the
details when it is up and running.

From a Matrix point of view, this is very
exciting, because we have been working on exactly how to do this stuff for
years, and our goal from the beginning has been to allow interoperability
between other systems. So we have a lot to offer on how to design a system that
allows rich interactions to work between very different systems, while
providing effective systems to fight abuse. One part that we can’t tackle
without the co-operation of the dominant messengers is end-to-end encryption,
because we can’t control the message formats that are used on the clients, so
it’s really exciting that MIMI’s work might improve that situation.

I personally feel a little skeptical that the “gatekeepers” will implement DMA
in a really good way, like what we were discussing at IETF. I think it’s more
likely that they will do the bare minimum, and make it difficult to use so
that the experience is so bad that no-one uses it. However, if one or two major
players do adopt a proper interoperable standard, it could pick up all the
minor players, and become something genuinely useful.

I really enjoyed going to the IETF meeting, and am incredibly grateful to the
dedicated people doing this work. I really hope that the MIMI group forms and
successfully creates a useful standard. I’m also really optimistic that the
things we’ve learned while creating Matrix can help with this process.

Whether this standard begins to solve the horrible problems we have with closed
messaging silos and user lock-in to potentially exploitative or harmful
platforms is probably out of our hands.

If you’d like to get involved with MIMI, check out the page here:
datatracker.ietf.org/group/mimi/about.

Evidence-based Software Engineering book: two years later

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Two years ago, my book Evidence-based Software Engineering: based on the publicly available data was released. The first two weeks saw 0.25 million downloads, and 0.5 million after six months. The paperback version on Amazon has sold perhaps 20 copies.

How have the book contents fared, and how well has my claim to have discussed all the publicly available software engineering data stood up?

The contents have survived almost completely unscathed. This is primarily because reader feedback has been almost non-existent, and I have hardly spent any time rereading it.

In the last two years I have discovered maybe a dozen software engineering datasets that would have been included, had I known about them, and maybe another dozen non-software related datasets that could have been included in the Human behavior/Cognitive capitalism/Ecosystems/Reliability chapters. About half of these have been the subject of blog posts (links below), with the others waiting to be covered.

Each dataset provides a sliver of insight into the much larger picture that is software engineering; joining the appropriate dots, by analyzing multiple datasets, can provide a larger sliver of insight into the bigger picture. I have not spent much time attempting to join dots, but have joined a few tiny ones, and a few that are not so small, e.g., Estimating using a granular sequence of values and Task backlog waiting times are power laws.

I spent the first year, after the book came out, working through the backlog of tasks that had built up during the 10-years of writing. The second year was mostly dedicated to trying to find software project data (including joining Twitter), and reading papers at a much reduced rate.

The plot below shows the number of monthly downloads of the A4 and mobile friendly pdfs, along with the average kbytes per download (code+data):

Downloads of A4 and mobile pdf over 2-years... pending ISP disk not being full

The monthly averages for 2022 are around 6K A4 and 700 mobile friendly pdfs.

I have been averaging one in-person meetup per week in London. Nearly everybody I tell about the book has not previously heard of it.

The following is a list of blog posts either analyzing existing data or discussing/analyzing new data.

Introduction
analysis: Software effort estimation is mostly fake research
analysis: Moore’s law was a socially constructed project

Human behavior
data (reasoning): The impact of believability on reasoning performance
data: The Approximate Number System and software estimating
data (social conformance): How large an impact does social conformity have on estimates?
data (anchoring): Estimating quantities from several hundred to several thousand
data: Cognitive effort, whatever it might be

Ecosystems
data: Growth in number of packages for widely used languages
data: Analysis of a subset of the Linux Counter data
data: Overview of broad US data on IT job hiring/firing and quitting

Projects
analysis: Delphi and group estimation
analysis: The CESAW dataset: a brief introduction
analysis: Parkinson’s law, striving to meet a deadline, or happenstance?
analysis: Evaluating estimation performance
analysis: Complex software makes economic sense
analysis: Cost-effectiveness decision for fixing a known coding mistake
analysis: Optimal sizing of a product backlog
analysis: Evolution of the DORA metrics
analysis: Two failed software development projects in the High Court

data: Pomodoros worked during a day: an analysis of Alex’s data
data: Multi-state survival modeling of a Jira issues snapshot
data: Over/under estimation factor for ‘most estimates’
data: Estimation accuracy in the (building|road) construction industry
data: Rounding and heaping in non-software estimates
data: Patterns in the LSST:DM Sprint/Story-point/Story ‘done’ issues
data: Shopper estimates of the total value of items in their basket

Reliability
analysis: Most percentages are more than half

Statistical techniques
Fitting discontinuous data from disparate sources
Testing rounded data for a circular uniform distribution

Post 2020 data
Pomodoros worked during a day: an analysis of Alex’s data
Impact of number of files on number of review comments
Finding patterns in construction project drawing creation dates

WMI Performance Anomaly: Querying the Number of CPU Cores

Chris Oldwood from The OldWood Thing

As one of the few devs that both likes and is reasonably well-versed in PowerShell I became the point of contact for a colleague that was bemused by a performance oddity when querying the number of cores on a host. He was introducing Ninja into the build and needed to throttle its expectations around how many actual cores there were because hyperthreading was enabled and our compilation intensive build was being slowed by its bad guesswork [1].

The PowerShell query for the number of cores (rather than logical processors) was pulled straight from the Internet and seemed fairly simple:

(Get-WmiObject Win32_Processor |
  measure -Property NumberOfCores -Sum).Sum

However when he ran this it took a whopping 4 seconds! Although he was using a Windows VM running on QEMU/KVM, I knew from benchmarking a while back this setup added very little overhead, i.e. only a percentage or two, and even on my work PC I observed a similar tardy performance. Here’s how we measured it:

Measure-Command {
  (Get-WmiObject Win32_Processor |
  measure -Property NumberOfCores -Sum).Sum
} | % TotalSeconds
4.0867539

(As I write my HP laptop running Windows 11 is still showing well over a second to run this command.)

My first instinct was that this was some weird overhead with PowerShell, what with it being .Net based so I tried the classic native wmic tool under the Git Bash to see how that behaved:

$ time WMIC CPU Get //Format:List | grep NumberOfCores  | cut -d '=' -f 2 | awk '{ sum += $1 } END{ print sum }'
4

real    0m4.138s

As you can see there was no real difference so that discounted the .Net theory. For kicks I tried lscpu under the WSL based Ubuntu 20.04 and that returned a far more sane time:

$ time lscpu > /dev/null

real    0m0.064s

I presume that lscpu will do some direct spelunking but even so the added machinery of WMI should not be adding the kind of ridiculous overhead that we were seeing. I even tried my own C++ based WMICmd tool as I knew that was talking directly to WMI with no extra cleverness going on behind the scenes, but I got a similar outcome.

On a whim I decided to try pushing more work onto WMI by passing a custom query instead so that it only needed to return the one value I cared about:

Measure-Command {
  (Get-WmiObject -Query 'select NumberOfCores from Win32_Processor' |
  measure -Property NumberOfCores -Sum).Sum
} | % TotalSeconds
0.0481644

Lo-and-behold that gave a timing in the tens of milliseconds range which was far closer to lscpu and definitely more like what we were expecting.

While my office machine has some “industrial strength” [2] anti-virus software that could easily be to blame, my colleague’s VM didn’t, only the default of MS Defender. So at this point I’m none the wiser about what was going on although my personal laptop suggests that the native tools of wmic and wmicmd are both returning times more in-line with lscpu so something funky is going on somewhere.

 

[1] Hyper-threaded cores meant Ninja was scheduling too much concurrent work.

[2] Read that as “massively interfering”!

 

A study of deceit when reporting information in a known context

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

A variety of conflicting factors intrude when attempting to form an impartial estimate of the resources needed to perform a task. The customer/manager, asking for the estimate wants to hear a low value, creating business/social pressure to underestimate; overestimating increases the likelihood of completing the task within budget.

A study by Oey, Schachner and Vul investigated the strategic reasoning for deception/lying in a two-person game.

A game involved a Sender and Receiver, with the two players alternating between the roles. The game started with both subjects seeing a picture of a box containing red and blue marbles (the percentage of red marbles was either 20%, 50%, or 80%). Ten marbles were randomly selected from this ‘box’, and shown to the Sender. The Sender was asked to report to the Receiver the number of red marbles appearing in the random selection, K_{report} (there was an incentive to report higher/lower, and punishment for being caught being inaccurate). The Receiver could accept or reject the number of red balls reported by the Sender. In the actual experiment, unknown to the human subjects, one of every game’s subject pair was always played by a computer. Every subject played 100 games.

In the inflate condition: If the Receiver accepted the report, the Sender gained K_{report} points, and the Receiver gained 10-K_{report} points.

If the Receiver rejected the report, then:

  • if the Sender’s report was accurate (i.e.,K_{report} == K_{actual}), the Sender gained K_{report} points, and the Receiver gained 10-K_{report}-5 points (i.e., a -5 point penalty),
  • if the Sender’s report was not accurate, the Receiver gained 5 points, and the Sender lost 5 points.

In the deflate condition: The points awarded to the Sender was based on the number of blue balls in the sample, and the points awarded to the Received was based on the number of red balls in the sample (i.e., the Sender had in incentive to report fewer red balls).

The plot below shows the mean rate of deceit (i.e., the fraction of a subject’s reports where K_{actual} < K_{report}, averaged over all 116 subject’s mean) for a given number of red marbles actually seen by the Sender; vertical lines show one standard deviation, calculated over the mean of all subjects (code+data):

Mean rate of deceit for each number of red marbles seen, with bars showing standard deviation.

Subjects have some idea of the percentage of red/blue balls, and are aware that their opponent has a similar idea.

The wide variation in the fraction of reports where a subject reported a value greater than the number of marbles seen, is likely caused by variation in subject level of risk aversion. Some subjects may have decided to reduce effort by always accurately reporting, while others may have tried to see how much they could get away with.

The wide variation is particularly noticeable in the case of a box containing 80% red. If a Sender’s random selection contains few reds, then the Sender can feel confident reporting to have seen more.

The general pattern shows subjects being more willing to increase the reported number when they are supplied with few.

There is a distinct change of behavior when half of the sample contains more than five red marbles. In this situation, subjects may be happy to have been dealt a good hand, and are less inclined to risk losing 5-points for less gain.

Estimating involves considering more factors than the actual resources likely to be needed to implement the task; the use of round numbers is one example. This study is one of few experimental investigations of numeric related deception. The use of students having unknown motivation is far from ideal, but they are better than nothing.

When estimating in a team context, there is an opportunity to learn about the expectations of others and the consequences of over/under estimating. An issue for another study 🙂

Studying the lifetime of Open source

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

A software system can be said to be dead when the information needed to run it ceases to be available.

Provided the necessary information is available, plus time/money, no software ever has to remain dead, hardware emulators can be created, support libraries can be created, and other necessary files cobbled together.

In the case of software as a service, the vendor may simply stop supplying the service; after which, in my experience, critical components of the internal service ecosystem soon disperse and are forgotten about.

Users like the software they use to be actively maintained (i.e., there are one or more developers currently working on the code). This preference is culturally driven, in that we are living through a period in which most in-use software systems are actively maintained.

Active maintenance is perceived as a signal that the software has some amount of popularity (i.e., used by other people), and is up-to-date (whatever that means, but might include supporting the latest features, or problem reports are being processed; neither of which need be true). Commercial users like actively maintained software because it enables the option of paying for any modifications they need to be made.

Software can be a zombie, i.e., neither dead or alive. Zombie software will continue to work for as long as the behavior of its external dependencies (e.g., libraries) remains sufficiently the same.

Active maintenance requires time/money. If active maintenance is required, then invest the time/money.

Open source software has become widely used. Is Open source software frequently maintained, or do projects inhabit some form of zombie state?

Researchers have investigated various aspects of the life cycle of open source projects, including: maintenance activity, pull acceptance/merging or abandoned, and turnover of core developers; also, projects in niche ecosystems have been investigated.

The commits/pull requests/issues, of circa 1K project repos with lots of stars, is data that can be automatically extracted and analysed in bulk. What is missing from the analysis is the context around the creation, development and apparent abandonment of these projects.

Application areas and development tools (e.g., editor, database, gui framework, communications, scientific, engineering) tend to have a few widely used programs, which continue to be actively worked on. Some people enjoy creating programs/apps, and will start development in an area where there are existing widely used programs, purely for the enjoyment or to scratch an itch; rarely with the intent of long term maintenance, even when their project attracts many other developers.

I suspect that much of the existing research is simply measuring the background fizz of look-alike programs coming and going.

A more realistic model of the lifecycle of Open source projects requires human information; the intent of the core developers, e.g., whether the project is intended to be long-term, primarily supported by commercial interests, abandoned for a successor project, or whether events got in the way of the great things planned.

How to build/upgrade emacs-mac using homebrew

Timo Geusch from The Lone C++ Coder&#039;s Blog

In the time honored tradition of using one’s blog as an Internet-enabled notepad, here’s a quick not on how I build GNU Emacs on macOS using homebrew and the emacs-mac port cask: brew upgrade -s railwaycat/emacsmacport/emacs-mac --with-mac-metal --with-imagemagick --with-native-comp --with-modern-icon --with-natural-title-bar This - amongst other features - turns on some experimental macOS-relevant features and most importantly, the optional native compilation of Elisp code.

Clustering source code within functions

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

The question of how best to cluster source code into functions is a perennial debate that has been ongoing since functions were first created.

Beginner programmers are told that clustering code into functions is good, for a variety of reasons (none of the claims are backed up by experimental evidence). Structuring code based on clustering the implementation of a single feature is a common recommendation; this rationale can be applied at both the function/method and file/class level.

The idea of an optimal function length (measured in statements) continues to appeal to developers/researchers, but lacks supporting evidence (despite a cottage industry of research papers). The observation that most reported fault appear in short functions is a consequence of most of a program’s code appearing in short functions.

I have had to deal with code that has not been clustered into functions. When microcomputers took off, some businessmen taught themselves to code, wrote software for their line of work and started selling it. If the software was a success, more functionality was needed, and the businessman (never encountered a woman doing this) struggled to keep on top of things. A common theme was a few thousand lines of unstructured code in one function in a single file

Adding structural bureaucracy (e.g., functions and multiple files) reduced the effort needed to maintain and enhance the code.

The problem with ‘born flat’ source is that the code for unrelated functionality is often intermixed, and global variables are freely used to communicate state. I have seen the same problems in structured function code, but instances are nowhere near as pervasive.

When implementing the same program, do different developers create functions implementing essentially the same functionality?

I am aware of two datasets relating to this question: 1) when implementing the same small specification (average length program 46.3 lines), a surprising number of variants (6,301) are created, 2) an experiment that asked developers to reintroduce functions into ‘flattened’ code.

The experiment (Alexey Braver’s MSc thesis) took an existing Python program, ‘flattened’ it by inlining functions (parameters were replaced by the corresponding call arguments), and asked subjects to “… partition it into functions in order to achieve what you consider to be a good design.”

The 23 rows in the plot below show the start/end (green/brown delimited by blue lines) of each function created by the 23 subjects; red shows code not within a function, and right axis is percentage of each subjects’ code contained in functions. Blue line shows original (currently plotted incorrectly; patched original code+data):

3n+1 programs containing various lines of code.

There are many possible reasons for the high level of agreement between subjects, including: 1) the particular example chosen, 2) the code was already well-structured, 3) subjects were explicitly asked to create functions, 4) the iterative process of discovering code that needs to be written did not occur, 5) no incentive to leave existing working code as-is.

Given that most source has a short and lonely existence, is too much time being spent bike-shedding function contents?

Given how often lower level design time happens at code implementation time, perhaps discussion of function contents ought to be viewed as more about thinking how things fit together and interact, than about each function in isolation.

Analyzing each function in isolation can create perverse incentives.