>Production code should be understandable by an on-call person at 4 am. I don't like the "simple language means understandable code" argument being thrown arou

>Production code should be understandable by an on-call person at 4 am. I don't like the "simple language means understandable code" argument being thrown around like it was some obvious fact. I'm currently working on a project whose major component is a byzantine home-grown message passing framework written in pretty much Java-in-C++ (old school OO with liberal use of shared pointers. Not that I would call C++ in any form "simple", but I do think that C++ without template magic is simpler than Haskell with GHC magic, or, say, any Lisp with a lot of macros). Maybe it's a case of grass being greener on the other side, but I'd gladly take a monad transformer stack or a DSL written in Lisp macros over doing the same song and a dance over and over again just to implent a tiny new functionality, or trying to deduce the logic from someone else's sea of boilerplate. I mean, taking this logic to extreme, one could say that code written in assembly is easy to understand: it's adding a value to EAX now, then it jumps over there... This being said, Haskell does have something in it that encourages one to design a ballistic algebra that runs in the type system before even pointing a gun at one's foot.