Thanks to all for the many replies to this post. Indeed I was playing Devil's Advocate, making the post provocative to attract comments and discussion - and because I genuinely wanted to know what people consider an idiom. I wanted to see whether others considered recognised idioms good practice/obfu/cargo cult.

Plus, I did not feel that the issue of comprehensibility by the hoi polloi had been covered. I was interested in this because I find myself regularly having to debate the Java versus Perl argument, see Perl advocacy, CGI/ModPerl vs ASP/JSP.

For career reasons, I'm learning Java by the way, and I miss the intellectual freedom of TIMTOWDI.