The problem arises when you need to read the code of other modules or services. If you can rely on them working as they should, and interact with them using their well-defined and correctly-behaving interfaces, you won't need to read the code.

I'm a proponent of keeping things in a monolith as long as possible. Break code into files. Organize files into modules. A time may come when you need to separate out services. Often, people break things out too early, and don't spend enough effort on thinking how to break things up or on the interfaces.

> and interact with them using their well-defined and correctly-behaving interfaces, you won't need to read the code.

Don't you want determinism and deterministic simultations? If you do, you'll also need stub implementations (mocks, dummies) for your interfaces.

Some notes on that: https://blog.7mind.io/constructive-test-taxonomy.html

> A time may come when you need to separate out services.

Most likely it won't if you organise properly. For example, if each your component is an OSGi module.

> The problem arises when you need to read the code of other modules or services. If you can rely on them working as they should, and interact with them using their well-defined and correctly-behaving interfaces, you won't need to read the code.

You can say the exact same thing about C-headers though.

No, to me that's equally as bad. But 100k lines split across 500 well-named files is a lot easier to work with than 10+K line files or multi-repo code.

With an IDE you're can just look at the class hierarchy/data types rather than the files. As long as those are well organized, who cares hoe they span files?

For instance, in C# a class can span multiple files using "partial" or you can have multiple classes in a single file. It's generally not an issue as long as the code itself is organized. The only downside is the reliance on an IDE, which is pretty standard these days anyway.