Comment by MillenialMan

Honestly, this characterisation doesn't ring true to me at all. I find long functions much easier to read, inspect and think about than dutifully decomposed lasagne that forces me to jump around the codebase. But also, like... Scanning for matching braces? Who is writing your code? Indentation makes that extremely clear. And your IDE should have a number of tools for quickly establishing uses of a name, and scope.

The older I get, the more I think the vast majority of issues along the lines of "long code is hard to reason about" are just incompetent programmers being let loose on the codebase. Comment rot is another one - who on earth edits code without checking and modifying the surrounding comments? That's not an inherent feature of programming to me, it's crazy. However, I absolutely see comment rot in lasagne code - because the comments aren't proximate to the algorithm.

With regards to the idea that abstractions inherently misrepresent, I'll defer to Joel Spolsky for another point:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...