Speed limits exist to encourage traveling at speeds that are deemed safe for a given road. Although the meaning of "safe" will vary per person, the posted speed limits are more or less agreed upon as "good enough" by most people.
I don't know the history behind speed limits, but I'm fairly certain they came about after many incidents of people putting common sense aside and driving their automobiles at speeds that were way beyond any sane person's idea of safe: people would consistently drive at speeds that ultimately led to tragedies. Phrased differently, people were engaging in furious driving. Because the entire community of drivers could not adhere to what "safe" was, authorities defined it for them.
Fortunately for all the brilliant developers, the software community does not have authorities to define any sort of "safe" metrics for source code. What the software community does have is plenty of developers who put common sense aside and pump out source code files that are hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands of lines long!
It's wonderful that you have copy and paste, it's great to hear that you're a fast typer, and it's liberating that you have virtually unlimited disk space on which you can store all those bytes of text that you create—but stop doing it!
Nobody wants to dig through a source code file that's 4,000 lines long. I would also say that most people don’t want to dig through a source code file that's even 800 lines long. And although I've heard some people say that they "really don’t mind files that are a few hundred lines long" (possibly to emphasize their ginormous mental capacity), I'm sure that source code, split up nicely across three or four files, would register in their head much faster than the same source code bunched together into one file.
Warning: Only Serious Developers Beyond this Point
To all serious developers out there, I propose a challenge: Stop with the tragically gigantic source code files. I don’t want to throw up an arbitrary number that I think is “safe,” because the definition of "too long" will vary widely per person. But I feel like we need a number so that we have a very clear line of when we are being sloppy and unprofessional. If the number is too low, then many developers will say I'm crazy, unrealistic, and an idealist. They'll waive it off and not even continue reading. If the number is too high, then many developers who believe in short source code files and are good at keeping them short but still manage to pump out some long ones here and there will not be inclined to improve further still.
Give me a second here. This is not an easy decision.
Ok, after some deep thought, contemplation, and internal debate, I think I have a number. I will choose to err on the side of "that's still too long" and then bring that number down when we reach that goal, rather than err on the side of "that's way too low" and discourage countless number of developers from even trying to reach that goal.
I challenge all serious developers who are capable of writing excellent software to stop writing source code files that are more than 400 lines long—no exceptions. That means it doesn't matter that it was already 395 lines long when you got to it and you only added six more lines—fix it. It doesn't matter that "all that stuff in there really belongs together"—find a way to split it up. It doesn't matter that copy, paste, and mass rename was really the simplest way to do this and any other way would take you at least another two hours to make it better—find a way to make it better.
Now that's to all developers who consistently pump out hundred-line files like the sun consistently rises from the east.
To those developers who are usually under 400 lines—you're not off the hook. Remember, I said I'm going to err on the side of "that's still too long" so as not to discourage people who are really high up there from taking on this challenge. Those of you who are consistently in the 100-300, don't settle! I still want you to get better. You're still working with enough real estate to create big barriers to other developers who are new to your codebase, so make sure that, if your files really are in the couple-of-hundred-line range, there is a good reason why they're there. Revisit them once more—are you really sure that this is as simple as it could be? Are you really sure that you got at least all the low-hanging fruit?
So, Who's In?
The software community needs to get better at writing code. The software community—that means you as well! We're not going to get better at writing software by simply reading blogs and complaining about other developers' code. We need to reflect on our own code and identify specific points upon which we can improve. This, I believe, is an easy one to start with. Are you in?
