That's true, code is rarely linear. But the whole idea of encapsulation, separation of concerns and many, many other practices is to increase locality of a code

That's true, code is rarely linear. But the whole idea of encapsulation, separation of concerns and many, many other practices is to increase locality of a code. In that sense a well written and structured code has local, mostly linear systems that you can analyze in isolation to get insight into the larger system. With this in mind it doesn't matter that the overarching structure is much more complex. Translation unit you're analyzing is (or should) be mostly human-parsable in a linear fashion. What I found eye-opening in this article is that it challenged my concept of well structured code file. I was like "what?! this is blasphemy!" from the very beginning but at the end I was like "huh, I finally understand why sometimes #define's feel better in the center of a file than they feel at the top"[1]. It's rare for a blog entry to stir me like this. :) [1] amongst other things that came though my head