This is what I think of whenever I see someone taking a dogmatic stance on function length, conditional nesting depth, functional purity, OO-purity, etc. "Here'

This is what I think of whenever I see someone taking a dogmatic stance on function length, conditional nesting depth, functional purity, OO-purity, etc. "Here's a person who has never worked on text rendering, text editing, GUI event systems, image decoding, etc." I have a chunk of code for implementing pointers, cursors, button clicks, and drag-and-drop in games. It's some of the gnarliest code I've ever written. It's also some of the most resistent code to "good design patterns" I've ever seen. I've written it and tweaked it and rewritten it and thrown it away and started from scratch and it always comes out the same. When you're dealing with things that have to meet long-established user expectations, it's always going to be full of little edge cases that you can't abstract away.