I was writing from my own regret. I feel that I learnt surprisingly little by spending a decade rewriting badly written code. I should have found out what encap

I was writing from my own regret. I feel that I learnt surprisingly little by spending a decade rewriting badly written code. I should have found out what encapsulation was years earlier. Sure, there are lessons there, but I think you will pick most of them up anywhere; you're always exposed to code you don't like. I still value terseness highly, as in my opinion it's strongly correlated with readability (though not at all when taken to extremes), but I very often have to increase verbosity to increase maintainability. E.g. don't take shortcuts that will leak through abstractions.