I think it's necessary to expand on the authors definition of "complex" vs "simple"... Things can be "complex" and thus hard to read for many difference reasons

I think it's necessary to expand on the authors definition of "complex" vs "simple"... Things can be "complex" and thus hard to read for many difference reasons: At one extreme the reader is definitely responsible for things like understanding an underlying algorithm - the algorithm chosen might be a good choice, but it might also be very complex. It's not always possible to clearly convey an efficient implementation of a complex algorithm in code - It could be argued at the most that the author should name the algo in a comment, but litering the implementation with comments describing the algorithm would make it harder to read for someone who is familiar with the algorithm. At the other extreme there are all kinds of unnecessary complexity that make it hard to read, some by poorly suited forced design patterns, some by cruft that accumulates and some by un-refactored growth (big ball of mud). One of my pet hates is highly layered object oriented code where someone has gone to painful ends to generalise and modularise the fuck out of every single routine to the point that the overhead of traversing the hierarchy to determine what actually happens in what order with what side effects when you call one of the outer layers of that ginormous onion is humanly impractical. I'd call that unreadable code due to complexity that the authors are responsible for.