[kristiandupont]

I remember Code Complete giving a different recommendation, googled and found this: http://stackoverflow.com/a/670039

>I recently wrote some code for Class::Sniff which would detect "long methods" and report them as a code smell. I even wrote a blog post about how I did this (quelle surprise, eh?). That's when Ben Tilly asked an embarrassingly obvious question: how do I know that long methods are a code smell?

>I threw out the usual justifications, but he wouldn't let up. He wanted information and he cited the excellent book Code Complete as a counter-argument. I got down my copy of this book and started reading "How Long Should A Routine Be" (page 175, second edition). The author, Steve McConnell, argues that routines should not be longer than 200 lines. Holy crud! That's waaaaaay to long. If a routine is longer than about 20 or 30 lines, I reckon it's time to break it up.

>Regrettably, McConnell has the cheek to cite six separate studies, all of which found that longer routines were not only not correlated with a greater defect rate, but were also often cheaper to develop and easier to comprehend. As a result, the latest version of Class::Sniff on github now documents that longer routines may not be a code smell after all. Ben was right. I was wrong.

[mschoebel]

Great. So I could have just left that 100-line function as it was and been spared that 30-minute bug-hunt for the missing "+".

Of course I wouldn't have written that blog-article then, and wouldn't have gotten onto the HN homepage... Oh, well... :)