"But that does outweigh the fact non-experts don't know exactly what the statement is doing?" That thinking can cover a whole lot of code, and raises the quest

"But that does outweigh the fact non-experts don't know exactly what the statement is doing?" That thinking can cover a whole lot of code, and raises the question of what defines an expert? Use the whole language; people become experts by experiencing new things. The guidelines should be, can you yourself still read and understand it a month later, and do you find that a particular idiom tends to make bugs easier or harder to find.