I’m on your side, I just want to say I think “one screen” of code for a sub is a decent rule of thumb that catches a lot of problems; especially for coders like me who often write code like prose without always having a plan. It’s the point where I ask “Is this the best way to do this?” but not “Oh, no! Better cut this into parts quick.”

I would also rather have a LONG sub than 5 private classes, not an exaggeration in my (well, our) code base, or whatever a Java-oriented hacker might use instead. One of the Perl hackers in my group—designed and wrote most of the early code—was Java-oriented and it’s ostensibly “better engineering” but in practice close to zero-reusuability, widely-denormalized because of it, painful, and confusing code.