You're really against Code Climate huh? Just what did it do to you to garner such hatred? I'm not personally a fan but I can see how it may help large companies in certain situations.
Anyways, when I asked about a "maximum" I was not asking in absolute terms. What do you see as a reasonable max for the majority of use cases?
At which point do you start feeling bad about your method?
I'm against Code Climate because it promulgates nonsensical metrics in ways that are actively harmful to good engineering. Just like Bob Martin and his concept of “clean code”. All of these things are at best sigil markers. They aren't solutions, and they can't provide any answers.
I don't have a max length to a method, because I'm not a prescriptivist. What I have is a point where I stop understanding what a method is doing, or I can't explain it cleanly. Sometimes I keep the method as long, but better comment it. Sometimes I factor it out. The point at which I do so varies based on the code, time, and many other factors.
I've worked on a C++ codebase that had a 3,000+ line function that was nearly impossible to factor out because of a non-trivial amount of state that would have either:
a. required passing much of that state as parameters to the factored out functions/methods (even if you put it in a wrapper object/struct); or
b. extracting all of the (working) behaviour into one or more objects whose sole purpose is to encapsulate the behaviour of this function.
I absolutely hated working on that function, but it was essentially the main loop of the program. You could step through those 3k lines and get a fairly decent feel for what the program was going to do, when, and how often it would repeat. The hardest part was where people before had extracted code out…that was called exactly once. We tried three times to extract the code—and failed three times, ending up leaving the code the way it was because our extractions were more complex and less understandable than the existing crappy code.
My point is that there's nosuchthing as a reasonable max for the majority of use cases. It depends on what you're doing and in what code.
"had a 3,000+ line function that was nearly impossible to factor out"
Sounds like the only reason it was nearly impossible to factor out was because someone didn't stop at line 500 and say "hey this is getting out of hand".
Anyways, when I asked about a "maximum" I was not asking in absolute terms. What do you see as a reasonable max for the majority of use cases?
At which point do you start feeling bad about your method?