Recently, I’ve been talking with a friend about the code I’ve written. The code looked something like:

import json  def save_data(destination, data):   with open(destination, 'w') as out:     json.dump(data,out, ensure_ascii=False)  # Code...  save_data(path,data) 

Similar for loading the file.

My friend argued that it’s not much of a save(I agree, that wasn’t my point). He also said that it makes a code harder to read, because you have to look up the definition of save_data to know what it does(I disagree) and suggested just leaving the code instead of moving it to a function.

I think that the code is at least as readable, potentially reduces redundancy(perhaps we will need to save more than one file) and could potentially help during refactorization(instead of modifying every place where the file is saved, we’d just change save_data instead), even though right now we only save one thing to a file.

Is it really a bad idea to move even small, once-used pieces of code to functions?

I have tagged the question with Python, since the code is Python, but I think that the question is universal.