I like short code, but for exactly the opposite reasons. I can write long stretches of code; I won’t be very happy doing it, but all it takes is to start and keep going.
Reading vast plains of mostly-obvious code, though, attempting to extract the author’s insights from them—that can be genuinely difficult. It’s also very taxing, because it’s never going to be all obvious, you see? Only mostly so. At some point somebody, somewhere, needed to tweak something just a bit to avoid a momentary difficulty, or their brain slipped, or they were new and didn’t know a subtle detail of how things are supposed to be done. Whatever the reason, I now need to remain in a state of constant vigilance for the entire journey.
Give me two pages of code to stare at for an hour until they click any day. As funny as this sounds, that is just plain less effort (and less perception of wasted effort as well, if we’re being honest).
(Now, I wouldn’t object to having both options—a concise description and its long and borung expansion for when I’m just not smart enough to get it—but that’s a language design problem that has for the most part remained unsolved for several decades now. So I’m not holding my breath.)
Reading vast plains of mostly-obvious code, though, attempting to extract the author’s insights from them—that can be genuinely difficult. It’s also very taxing, because it’s never going to be all obvious, you see? Only mostly so. At some point somebody, somewhere, needed to tweak something just a bit to avoid a momentary difficulty, or their brain slipped, or they were new and didn’t know a subtle detail of how things are supposed to be done. Whatever the reason, I now need to remain in a state of constant vigilance for the entire journey.
Give me two pages of code to stare at for an hour until they click any day. As funny as this sounds, that is just plain less effort (and less perception of wasted effort as well, if we’re being honest).
(Now, I wouldn’t object to having both options—a concise description and its long and borung expansion for when I’m just not smart enough to get it—but that’s a language design problem that has for the most part remained unsolved for several decades now. So I’m not holding my breath.)