“Ideally under 70 lines” is not “always under 70 lines under pain of death”.

It’s a guideline. There are exceptions. Most randomly-selected 100-line functions in the wild would probably benefit from being four 25-line functions. But many wouldn’t. Maturity is knowing when the guideline doesn’t apply. But if you find yourself constantly writing a lot of long functions, it’s a good signal something is off.

Sure, language matters. Domain matters too. Pick a number other than 70 if you’re using a verbose language like golang. Pick a number less if you’re using something more concise.

People need to stop freaking out over reasonable, well-intentioned guidelines as if they’re inviolable rules. 150 is way too many for almost all functions in mainstream languages. 20 would need to be violated way too often to be a useful rule of thumb.

▲ Kwpolska 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

As with all guidelines, some people will turn it into a hard rule, and build a linter to enforce it. Then they will split long functions into shorter ones, but with a lot of arguments. And then their other linter that limits argument count will kick in.

▲ VBprogrammer 41 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

And someone else will use the idea that this is a misconception to justify putting hundreds of lines in one function.

Some junior dev will then come along with his specific user story and, not wanting to tear the whole thing up, will insert his couple of lines. Repeat over a 10 year lifecycle and it becomes completely unmanageable.

I remember trying to tease apart hundreds of lines of functions in a language which didn't have the IDE support we have these days. It was always painful.

Even the most script like functions I've ever worked with benefit from comments like:

  # Validate that the payment was successfully sent.

These subheadings can just as easily become functions. If you limit the context in each function it becomes a genuine improvement.

▲ n4r9 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Sounds like an opportunity to guide that person.

	▲	wouldbecouldbe an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Good luck Arguing with stubborn devs who know it all

▲ eviks 32 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> It’s a guideline ... Pick a number

It's using a parameter of secondary importance as a primary, so it's wrong with any number. The comment even has a helpful analogy to LOCs. People need to stop freaking out over reasonable, well-intentioned criticism of guidelines as if they were arguing something else like misundertstanding of that strictness of rules.