I'm not positive but I think that there have been studies that show that a programmer's output in LOC per day is fairly constant no matter what the language is.

I'm not positive but I think that there have been studies that show that a programmer's output in LOC per day is fairly constant no matter what the language is. I could imagine this being similar -- maybe about 150-200 "operations" is the right number, no matter what level of abstraction those operations are at. That's an interesting point about the setup code though. When you have to do explicit memory management, there may be a greater cost to dividing a long method into several smaller ones. In general, splitting up a function into smaller ones might just have a greater cost in those languages. It's also possible the development tools are a factor -- it's a lot easier to jump between various methods in Eclipse than it is in vi (for me, anyways).