I'm wholly in favor of making things maintainable, and I have no interest in gratuitous confusion. So I think we
are in broad agreement.
However, when I'm under a deadline, I simply don't have the
time to optimize for readability; I have to optimize for
speed of programming and ease of debugging (that's debugging
my own code, BTW :-)). And the shorter my code is,
the less likely it is to be broken.
I'm reminded of something Kipling is reported to have written: ``I apologize for the length of this letter,
but I had no time to make it shorter.'' In constrast,
writing short Perl code is easy; when I'm programming
for money, I have no time to make it longer.
-- Chip Salzenberg, Free-Floating Agent of Chaos
