I don't think the fact that a function works well is a good enough reason to write a 2000 line function. Sometimes there are long pieces of code that implement complex algorithms that are difficult to break into smaller pieces of code, but those cases are limited to the few you mentioned.
Computers execute code in a linear fashion, why on earth would you "need a reason" to NOT abstract something? Just because abstraction is often the right thing to do doesn't make it the base case.
It's like saying you need a reason not to add 4000 random jumps in your assembly code just to make it more difficult to read...
> that implement complex algorithms that are difficult to break into smaller pieces of code
My longest code is always image processing. It's usually too hard to break up for the sake of breaking up. There's nothing to reuse between the calls to filters/whatever.
I guess all we know is there were 2K lines of code and the commenter thinks that was the right way to do it. It would be necessary to see the code to appropriately critique it.
Not just the commenter, but his team as well. It passed code review with flying colors, apparently. The moral of the story is that there always exceptions and developers should not be ideologically committed to one approach above all else.
we know more than that: You could argue that every one of those 9 scopes could be a separate function, but then devs would be tempted to reuse them. Yet, each step had subtle assumptions about what happened before.
what we don't know is if it would have been possible to abstract those assumptions away so that functions could have been defined without them.
