Some have leveled the criticism that "part 1" of this post is unnecessarily contriving a problem that doesn't really exist in "good code" -- if you really need to narrow a scope of some declarations in a function, then that function is too complex already and that bigger problem is what you need to fix.
Just to be extra clear: if a chunk of code is already reasonable to make a function, that's not the sort of code I'm talking about in either of these blog posts. If it's being called multiple times, or if it's completely independent and makes sense as its own logical chunk, make it a function. I'm talking about a different sort of code, a set of a few statements related to each other, that declare one or more variables, but which logically still belong inside another function. That's the context here.
OK, let's stop talking about this stuff abstractly.