Thank you for saving me the trouble of having to write the same thing. We programmers often seem to forget that we spend far, far more time reading code than w

Thank you for saving me the trouble of having to write the same thing. We programmers often seem to forget that we spend far, far more time reading code than writing it, therefore readability should be a (if not the) primary consideration when engineering it. That said, I do understand where Whitney's terseness impetus comes from: I have always lamented how little of my code will fit on the screen, with the number of vertical lines being the limiting factor; that is precisely why my taskbar is on the left-hand-side. (And don't get me started on monitors designed for watching wide-screen movies -- 1600x1200 FTW!) As such, I can't really fault his intention as much as his execution, and I feel that ultimately the solution to his (really, our) problem is that all our code (not just his) needs an IDE that can expand such terse definitions as per the current programmer's preferred style. This has been my perspective for many years, especially after wrangling various SQL dialects and the mostly awful formatting preferences of my peers. As I see it, the ideal solution is to store all code files as its token stream and have a default format that can be customized by each programmer in the IDE. As a result, each program will be stored as its pure content (which would help with version control (so long as whitespace is ignored)) AND each programmer would get to work with their preferred perspective. Of course the problem with this methodology is that the tokenizer and formatter better be flawless or you're f*ed, not to mention the fact that there are various IDEs that people like to work with.