While it's not a perfect example or solution, this illustrate a fairly common issue with modern code. He also mentions too many parameters. Other commonly frown upon constructs include unclear names (java "filter" or "compareTo" easily come to mind), boolean parameters (One should use named enums instead). Some add to the list out parameters (passing a to-be-modified list as a parameter), functions returning their modified input parameter, even though they certainly have their usefulness (like being able to handle memory management outside of the callee). I'd personally like to add String parameters to the list, but modern language make such restrictions often too cumbersome.

I the given example, I'd love to see a language with optional named parameters. For the function copy(String fromFileName, String toFileName), instead of calling copy (file!, file2), one would have the possibility of calling copy(from:file1, to:file2)