[radicalbyte]

I've been programming forever now and have written a lot of C#, TypeScript (/JS) and Python - and I much prefer the approach used in ServiceStack and in Vue.js of putting the "things which belong together" in one file than the alternatives.

You see in C# and Java that people love splitting classes into files (and are forced to by automated auditing tools - my last big project suffered from that, even as Lead I had my hands tied). Navigating such projects is horrible outside of tooling (such as in github) but fine if you always work within the IDE.

In Python I'm used to wading through classes of >1k LOC which are only slightly related because they have the opposite habit. I've yet to find a way to work around this.

Honestly I'm not sure what I find worst: it really depends on the project or the domain. If I had to chose I think that I'd prefer "too many small files" to "one huge file" as the latter has an extremely high risk of turning into a "big ball of mud" and it's what the clueless beginners do. That and trauma of having to maintain some old Visual Basic system where that was the norm.

[kaba0]

While some tooling has trouble with many small files, I find it just as debilitating to navigate a huge C file for example, that mandates heavy jumping between different positions even in IDEs. Sure, I do know about multi-pane editing, but my brain prefers the “tab corresponds to file” abstraction.

[radicalbyte]

Same here.

Although to be completely honest: I would much rather that the AST was the main interface for code. The fact that our tools are based on text is a relic of the past.