You can sometimes find self-contained chunks of bigger software that lend themselves to that kind of style. For example, I once had to write a highly-compressed

You can sometimes find self-contained chunks of bigger software that lend themselves to that kind of style. For example, I once had to write a highly-compressed on-disk memory-mapped data structure for searching for large sets of phrases in text, along with associated payloads for each one. About half of that code is actual code; the other half is paragraph-length comments walking the reader through it. How are the payloads encoded? How does the index work? How do we handle prefix compression? What's the deal with unicode normalization? And so on. It was so much fun to write! These opportunities don't come along very often, but they do come along sometimes.