[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.