I tried to find more information on this by searching for those terms and "damian conway" but came up empty. Would you mind sharing a link, if you have one?
"Coding in paragraphs" is described in Damian Conway's book "Perl best practices" [1]
Myself I like coding in paragraphs very much, and giving the paragraphs one-liner headings (comments) definitely makes code for me more readable and easier to navigate.
I usually don't give a heading to a "paragraph" which is just one line, unless that line does something subtle.
(Conway provides a definition of "subtle": if you need to think more than 10 seconds or consult the fine manual to figure out what the line does).
I found a page which excerpts 10 of Conway's recommendations from Perl Best Practices (which I no longer have around). Point 7 is "Code in Commented Paragraphs", and the reasoning is about what I remember — it might even be taken from the book verbatim:
There are other recommendations on that page and in Conway's highly opinionated book which I disagree with (it's notorious for recommending Class::Std), but that point has stuck with me.
Note that Conway's example even includes three single-code-line paragraphs, all of which are commented. Perhaps Osterhout would not approve, or perhaps he would — each of those lines includes some subtlety, and each of the comments describes the "why" not the "what".
FWIW I don't always add a comment above single line paragraphs if the comment adds nothing. But neither does Conway comment "unpack arguments" above the first line in his example, nor say anything about the return statement — which to my mind illustrates that there's some flexibility to be expected in how you apply this technique.
