Pointless internet argument. :) If you have a function that's over 1000 lines, a lot of it is probably cruft or very app-specific which you might be able to reu

Pointless internet argument. :) If you have a function that's over 1000 lines, a lot of it is probably cruft or very app-specific which you might be able to reuse part of in other parts of the same project, but code-reuse across projects doing different things is something fairly rare. His reasoning is pretty sound on this, it didn't take long for me to find a 200-line function (to be fair it contains an inner class...) in a million-line+ OSS project I contribute to, but it's Java and doing something very specific that isn't going to be used outside of the project (since it makes use of lots of function calls to other parts of the project) and wouldn't really be used outside of that package in the project. There are places where you could save 5 lines over 3 or so places, but adding a utility function and documenting it usually negates any line-length benefits and doesn't do much for understanding. It can also make things harder for newcomers to figure out what the code is -really- doing, as he mentions. Of course, 200 lines is one thing, 1000 lines is really long... Especially if it's in the context of a 1000+ line-long class or module. In general I agree with you that modularity is good, I really favor a functional style at heart. :) I think it really depends on the context of use, for function-length. Some people can't stand functions bigger than an 80x24 terminal screen which I think is nuts. What I disagree with is his defense of not using (correct) data structures. Though if you have to roll your own data structures or they're hard to work with because your language and/or set of libraries suck, that's a problem, especially if you agree with his "optimizing your life" bit. And sometimes what seems like a good data structure actually isn't, which is why people do some analysis before writing code.