"I'd suggest that the important thing is not how many lines a function has, but whether it represents a single, cohesive idea." I think you have it exactly rig

"I'd suggest that the important thing is not how many lines a function has, but whether it represents a single, cohesive idea." I think you have it exactly right, and I wish I'd made that point, as clearly as this, in the original article (or indeed in the followup, which I stupidly did before reading the HN comments about the original.) A function/method is like a paragraph in prose writing. Any good style book will tell you that there is no "right length" for paragraphs (although bad teachers might teach rules like "no less than three lines, no more than ten". A paragraph should be exactly long enough to convey one clear point, whether that takes one line, ten, or twenty. The same for functions. By the way, I'd like to say that a LOT of the comments on this thread are really insightful (i.e. the include insights that are new to me, but which immediately make sense once I see them written down). It's pretty humbling to see this community so quickly come to so many valuable conclusions when my poor, bumbling article took so long to get to where it did. Thanks to all who have contributes -- I hope you'll stick around on The Reinvigorated Programmer and contribute to the discussions on there, too.