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So you think a persons religious beliefs affect their ability to program.

That's ridiculous. Even more ridiculous is your "reasoning".

Indeed. By introducing abstractions, you exchange performance and flexibility for simplicity (of one kind or another). More than one unmaintainable mess has been made by abstraction-hungry developers layering one leaky abstraction on top of another in a vein attempt to restore some of that flexibility.

This is why I'm a fan of top-down design. It tends to find the right balance almost automatically.

I'm not sure what that has to do with writing "badly formatted code", but I'd still caution against that. Some of the best advice I ever received: "There are no good writers, only good rewriters." I've found this to be true for code as well. It's amazing how much you can improve your code once you've distanced yourself from it a bit.

That doesn't make sense to me. Why would a persons beliefs about religion (or politics, race, potato chip flavors) have any influence on their ability to write computer programs?

Do you think Buddhists write better code than Hindus? Are Raeliens better developers than Shintoists? What could possibly compel you to put forward such a silly belief?

I'd rather have a readable and maintainable 4500-line function than an unreadable and unmaintainable 45-line function.

I remember, years ago, standard advice to students to break up code in to functions when some process got over some number of lines. Know what we got? A lot of really odd functions of similar length, as they broke things apart at seemingly random boundaries! I'm still deeply suspicious when I hear people talk about a proper length for functions.

It's time to let that one go, and teach students that while shorter is often better, length doesn't really matter that much. They ought to factor out functions when they see them and when it makes the program more readable. I'll suggest this as a new rule-of-thumb: functions should do just one thing and be named accordingly.

(Still, 4500 lines? Damn, that's big.)

"Refactor" implies simplification, not optimization. Given all the disagreement here, maybe we should stop using such an imprecise term and just go with "rewrite".

I hope not.

Like writing computer programs?

1972 called, they're still pissed you returned their 'write-only memory' joke in such poor condition.

I've been saying that for 15 years. I just hope I don't need to wait another 15.

So do I, though I still think Dijkstra was wrong about that. I used to get skewered for expressing that opinion, however. Not that it matters much, I've found most developers are a bit over zealous when it comes to defending their treasured folk-knowledge.

In before the OOP craze, like you were, I thought it was just going to be a passing fad -- like countless fads before and after. I have no explanation for its sticking power, save the early popularity of Java and Microsoft's subsequent clone, C#. I figure it would have been dead before the new century had Sun and Microsoft hadn't tried to cash-in on it. It's a shame MS's ploy to fragment Java failed. It's one evil plan that might have done us some good!

Fortunately for us, It is weakening. Sacred cows are starting to look like the mistakes they always were. The hipster developers are even promoting composition over inheritance. (And not a moment too soon. I've seen a lot of talk about multiple inheritance lately. I thought we'd already learned our lesson about that!) A lot of young developers are even learning what modularity actually entails, and how OOP is inherently anti-modular. (It used to be a popular belief that OOP gave you modularity for free! It looks foolish in hindsight, I know, but that was the marketing buzz.) It gives me a bit of hope for the future.

So I'll keep my fun Dijkstra quote, to lend support to the next generation who will cast-off our mistakes. It looks like they're trending toward an imperative+functional era. It'll be interesting to see what comes out of that.

Yes, but it tends not to combust spontaneously.

Ah, so you're in on the conspiracy!

I considered that as well, and pulled down the picture from multiple sources.

I'm convinced that this is just a joke that I've missed. I've tried good displays, crappy displays, various lighting, brightness settings, backgrounds, room lighting, viewing angles and probably something I've forgot. I can not get that dress to look white and gold.

It reminds me of "The emperors new cloths".