Long functions don't necessarily make for bad code. If there aren't long loops or long conditionals, long functions can reveal a lot of structure without the co

Long functions don't necessarily make for bad code. If there aren't long loops or long conditionals, long functions can reveal a lot of structure without the cognitive overhead of many single-use functions. Good code uses abstraction judiciously. The same in prose leads to parentheticals and rabbit-holes. Good code is both easy to read and easy to modify, but making it easy to modify without losing much legibility is the hard bit. It requires a prediction of the future: what's likely to change and what isn't, and whether future change needs an indirection or if it should be integrated in place. There isn't a close analogue in writing, since writing is a linear tour of a whole, while code reading is usually a breadth-first directed search for the right place to either locate a bug or add a feature. Great writing uses fresh, vivid and appropriate analogies. Making up new stuff in code is more often than not the wrong thing to do. The writing which is closest to code is newspaper reporting: starting out with a summary, and iteratively delving deeper into details. This is writing designed to be skimmed by the reader and aborted when the desired information is acquired. The other prose which comes close is documentation. Neither make for great writing.