[whstl]

Sure, but nobody is saying that aesthetics don't matter. Quite the opposite. People have been saying this for decades, and even government agencies have code-style guidelines. Also, the idea that big procedures are problematic is as old as procedural programming itself.

The problem is that, when it comes to aesthetics, one of the two more-or-less-novel ideas of the book (and the one that is followed religiously by practitioners) is downright problematic when followed to the letter.

> when you see your functions doing 3 independent things, maybe it's time to break it in 3 sub functions

That's true, and I agree! But separation of concerns doesn't have much to do with 10-lines-per-method. The "One Level of Abstraction per Function" section, for example, provides a vastly better heuristic for good function-size than the number of lines, but unfortunately it's a very small part of the book.

> I see some criticism concerning [...] class variables being used as de facto global variables

The criticism is actually about the book recommending transforming local variables into instance/object variables... here's the quote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42489167

[lokar]

If the 3 things are related such that they will only ever be called in order one after the other (and they are not really complex) it’s better to just do all the work together.

[whstl]

Yep, if they're related then I agree 100%.