Heh, I agree with your first point. Some of it is flexibility, some of it is for code-reuse, some is claimed to be because of "readability" (smaller functions being easier to digest than larger ones). On the note of compile time safety: We have absolutely no margin for error, we need to be 100% sure that the code will fail to compile if someone mistakenly types a variable (use strict) or an attribute name. We deal in milliseconds, so any extra handling of a routine would just slow us down.