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I have to agree. When I was junior decades ago, I saw all those cool one liners as some sort of holy grail and had huge respect for the authors, like we had 10KM HDDs so every char counts.

Then I realized how hard they are to debug once codebase looks like this, and any serious production code will get debugged to hell, no doubt there. Also implementing changes require same mindset, which is rare in teams generally, so its basically a technical debt right in creation.

KISS, the most important principle in any form of engineering is exact opposite of this. I've seen and experienced great success with it. I haven't seen that much success when ignored, apart from one man / tiny homogeneous team show.






I admire terse code too. I can relate. I'm also old.

But:

> we had 10KM HDDs so every char counts.

Ten kilometre hard disk drives?

It can't be 10kB. Hard disks were never that small. Floppy disks were never that small.

Maybe it's not hard disk drives.

It can't be length of tape, or of mercury delay lines.

I am mystified.


thinks more

2 characters wrong? 10 MB hard disks?


I was just joking, sorry not a native english speaker.

What I meant was that disk space with code text was never an issue on modern PC, so optimizing for that doesn't make sense.




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