I feel like you're arguing against something else. It should be obvious that I'm not saying "ALWAYS USE 1-LINE FUNCTIONS". My point is that a phobia against sma

I feel like you're arguing against something else. It should be obvious that I'm not saying "ALWAYS USE 1-LINE FUNCTIONS". My point is that a phobia against small functions is both extremely common and typically harmful to code quality, for all the reasons I described. If it were easy enough to give someone a simple checklist of guidelines and have them produce high quality code, coding would be a lot easier, but it doesn't work that way. Coding well requires years of experience that produces the wisdom and perspective to know when and to use different techniques. It's what tells you "it's unnecessary to comment an i++ line", it's what tells you when and how to use one data structure over another, and so on. And no, I'm not "refactoring ahead of the refactoring", I'm refactoring where it makes sense, even down to a single line. That's the point. To properly compose things, and to avoid the bias against small functions. Not to atomize a program into infinite function calls, of course. Most of the code I've come across that is below the quality I'd like tends to have excessively large function definitions, precisely because there is such a widespread antipathy against splitting things up "for no reason" and against small functions. When it improves readability, when it improves the composition and modularity of the system, when it makes it easier to update, modify, improve logging and error handling, etc. those are all good reasons for extracting methods. The rare times I've seen code that required excessive jumping around to figure out what anything did it wasn't because of too many small methods, it was because of overzealous application of bad design patterns (e.g. call a factor method to produce a configuration object then instatiate some other factory and pass the configuration object to it to get a factory that produces what you want, that kind of nonsense). That's indicative of a failure of judgment. My point is, don't be afraid of small functions when they make sense. There are too many people who are afraid of small functions because, like you, they have these strong biases against them based on prejudice. How do you know when a small function is a good idea? Judgment and experience, of course, same as always.