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by eterm 163 days ago
This is from page 37 of Clean Code:

  > Even a switch statement with only two cases is larger than I'd like a single block or function to be.
His advice that follows, to leverage polymorphism to avoid switch statements isn't bad per-se, but his reasoning, that 6 lines is too long, was a reflection of his desire to get every function as short as possible.

In his own words, ( page 34 ):

> [functions] should be small. They should be smaller than that. That is not an assertion I can justify.

He then advocates for functions to be 2-3 lines each.

2 comments

> to leverage polymorphism to avoid switch statements [...] was a reflection of his desire to get every function as short as possible.

That's both true, but long way away from "every line should have it's own method", but I guess parent exaggerated for effect and I misunderstood them, I took it literally when I shouldn't.

I've edited my comment to add more context to that quote. He absolutely advocated for the most minimal of function lengths, beyond what is reasonable.
He has expressed admiration for lisp, and he comes from a time before IDEs. These may color his desired level of complexity.