Comment by Timwi
5 days ago
I have written long methods and will do so again and I wouldn't say it's because I have larger working memory or some other supposedly superior attribute. Some methods are just a long series of steps that you can just write one after another. Reading it from top to bottom is exactly as difficult/confusing/whatever as reading them as separate methods would be (assuming you put short comments in the same places where you would otherwise break it up). I think people just don't want inexperienced programmers to do that because they'll end up with tons of mutable state spanning the whole thing, and it's easier to tell them to break it up into methods than to explain what you mean by mutable state and limited scope.
Of course that's a legitimate case of longer files or functions, but I found that I was generally able to follow much larger functions, so comfortable with writing larger-than-average code in general.
Also I should note that longer code doesn't mean less abstraction; it rather means that abstraction is done without separate functions and files, and ordering and visual cues can (and probably should heavily) be used instead. Apparently this is not enough for most others though, as I have received multiple complaints in spite of such readability efforts.