From what I've read, your last paragraph is true, but only because the naming often isn't necessary. The importance of abstraction in a codebase that is 60 page

From what I've read, your last paragraph is true, but only because the naming often isn't necessary. The importance of abstraction in a codebase that is 60 pages of code is high, but it fades away if the equivalent J program can be 5 pages of expressions. Instead of defining some numerical operation that is only 5 characters long, just use the 5 characters in the 2 to 3 places where it is needed in your 5 pages of code. This way everything is explicit and you don't have to reference back to the definition. This would be an awful idea in Java, but it works great in J and APL. Aaron Hsu talks about this with his parallel APL compiler and refers to this as working at the macro level. Note that he has plenty of named items that are passed around in a data flow fashion, but he doesn't need to name every little function.