there's defnly some truth to this -- more concise (via expressive power) code can be easier to grok, because it's easier to see the forest w/o so many trees in

there's defnly some truth to this -- more concise (via expressive power) code can be easier to grok, because it's easier to see the forest w/o so many trees in the way. but on the other hand, having simple code where it's easy to point at each bit and say 'that does this, that goes here' can also make code easier to understand. for me personally, on balance, the latter wins outweigh the former losses when going from python -> go. i'd say it's probably a small bump down in expressiveness for a large jump up in 'look and know what it does'-ness. (it's not like go is really missing that much that python has -- maybe list comprehensions (which are great!), tuples, and generators?) it'd be fun to do some empirical investigation of these things. take some toy problem, code up idiomatic, by-the-language-advocates solutions, and then throw them at large groups of people asking them to make some change, or fix some deliberately introduced bug, and see how the #s came out. :)