[skywalk]

That goes against many recommendations I've read about refactoring and writing cleaner code:

"Good code invariably has small methods and small objects. I get lots of resistance to this idea, especially from experienced developers, but no one thing I do to systems provides as much help as breaking it into more pieces."

– Kent Beck

[dalke]

The little research I've seen has not backed up that opinion. While that view is shared by many - especially those who come from a Smalltalk heritage - the studies I've read about do not show a clear association between small pieces and more readable/maintainable code, at least not for code blocks under 100 lines or so.

I dislike reading Smalltalk influenced code with many small pieces. They tend to use instance state as a way to pass parameters, and that makes me uncomfortable - I have a leaning towards functional programming.

I also distrust function names. A function like "noMoreElves" might actually be "no more elves!" and implemented as "elfCount = 100". I exaggerate a little, but an inline "elfCount == 0" is much easier to verify than having to jump elsewhere to see the code.

[ramblerman]

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/153234/how-deep-are-your-...

Kent beck also gave this amazing (and suprising) answer on SO about "how far to go with your tests?" He is in my eyes, a true pragmatist and gives some sound advice.

Uncle bob on the other hand seems to have drunk too much of his own koolaid. I saw him give a talk 2 years ago at a java conference which made him seem more like a Steven Balmeresque salestype, not an active developer.