| everyone who cares about understanding the world.
Those fluent in math really need to drop this egocentric view. If you can't do matrix manipulations you aren't curious about the world? Give me a break. The breadth of topics that yield understanding of various parts of our world is vast. Do you have an early university understanding of history, politics, math, sociology, psychology, economics, law, capitalism, etc. etc. etc.
> they see nothing wrong with hundreds of tiny functions that are only called from one place
On almost every codebase I've been brought into, the simple guideline of "do less within your methods/functions" would lead to a higher engineering velocity for the organization. Yes, putting no thought behind the larger structure (e.g. how your public interfaces into/out of components are defined) will lead to too much jumping around, but if the functions are small and not leaking state then this is relatively easily remedied by someone with a systems bent. Small methods also convey to the reader the intent of the code by tying meaning to it through naming (if naming is thought out :)).
Large methods, on the other hand, build rigidity into the system and decreases its changeability. In this case, changes to the system necessitate reading and understanding the full implementation before modification. I will concede that I'm using "large methods" as a not-necessarily-true placeholder for "methods that do multiple things"
> refactoring your code for unit tests is making life easier for the computer, not humans
A machine does not care if you have unit tests. Unit tests are expressly for the human (team!) task of creating software that is maintainable and changeable.
Those fluent in math really need to drop this egocentric view. If you can't do matrix manipulations you aren't curious about the world? Give me a break. The breadth of topics that yield understanding of various parts of our world is vast. Do you have an early university understanding of history, politics, math, sociology, psychology, economics, law, capitalism, etc. etc. etc.