> Honestly, a PhD is the culmination of a very complicated thought process. Why wouldn't the program resulting from research be non-trivial to understand? The

> Honestly, a PhD is the culmination of a very complicated thought process. Why wouldn't the program resulting from research be non-trivial to understand? The subtlety here is that there is the complexity inherent to the problem domain, which is what you are referring to, and code complexity that arises from translating that complexity to a programming context. Environments like SciPy, Matlab, R, and Julia get rid of a lot of the latter while still forcing certain conventions to follow that make the code easier to read for outsiders, leaving the complexity of the algorithm itself. And I probably should have used Julia instead of Python as an example, since it aims and IMO succeeds as a "goldilocks" language that combines a lot of great ideas from all aforementioned languages plus Lisp[0]. IIRC, it is sometimes jokingly referred to as "secretly a Lisp" because part of the compiler is writting in... I think Scheme? [0] https://docs.julialang.org/en/release-0.4/manual/metaprogramming/ https://docs.julialang.org/en/release-0.4/manual/metaprogram...