10 commandments for creating good code

Although this is OO dogma, it's contradicted by the research literature. Empirical studies of function length show no benefit to shorter functions. Several studies have found them to be correlated with higher defect rates and costs (up to a threshold of a few hundred lines, at which point defects and costs start to rise again).

I was suprised when I first heard this. I think it's explained by the fact that adding function calls is not logically free: it adds conceptual overhead. Factoring code into shorter functions for its own sake doesn't produce benefit that exceeds this cost. There's a fundamental tradeoff here, which a dogmatic belief in short (or long) functions just misses.

Of course, the higher-level the language the shorter all your functions become.

If you're supposed to create an "interface", let's assume that's the public api.

But if you're trying to make methods small enough that comments are not needed, you're doing so for implementation purposes, since chances are most of those methods will be private.

Personally, I think a few comments are nice, especially to help orient someone their first time reading the code.

If you're doing something so magical that it requires comments to have any hope of being understood, you should have a really good reason for using so much magic.