i've also seen far worse code than that... at least you know what the code does...

the bottom line for me is that code has to be comprehensible at the end of the day. one-liners are pretty cool when it's throwaway/personal code, but if someone subjects me to having to read their deeply nested, ultra-idiomatic, highly !@##$$%%%^^^ punctuated, poorly thought-out chunk of code with no documentation then i am going to walk over to their desk and kick their butt ;-)

after all, personal style is personal style, but you can still be funky and clever if you don't use 5 lines instead of one...

as for the last code-chunk -- they appear to be saving their STDOUT in order to discard the output from something else. if indeed these lines occur as show without something after the 'close STDOUT' step, then i too am confused since they would (seem to) be accomplishing nothing.