Personally, I think its the result of dealing with a purely logical system. It doesn't matter to a computer how you put things, so long as everything in between follows some kind of logic. Therefore, the shortest, most consise way of telling the computer what to do is usually the best (with cavets--I'm not suggesting obfu belongs in production code). Anything more is just fluff.

Programmers screw up when they expect humans to act the same way. In general, I don't think most programmers are jerks such as your Cherry Bomb example (certainly there are some), but they will tend to be brutaly honest.

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I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be manipulated, and ended up creating an object system by accident.
-- Schemer

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated