I agree, and it reminds me of an analogy... I discovered IRC as a teenager in the 90s, and soon learned SMS-speak for rapid messaging. I was proud of how quick

I agree, and it reminds me of an analogy... I discovered IRC as a teenager in the 90s, and soon learned SMS-speak for rapid messaging. I was proud of how quickly I could write if I just wrote "u r" instead of "you are"... This was cool! In chatroom arguments, being able to belt out more sentences faster was better! But as my typing improved, I realized the above was a childish optimization. Real skill was able to write out correctly-spelled sentences just as fast. I then saw the SMS-speak as immature shortcuts. This realization carried over into code: good code is the clear, adequately verbose (but appropriately concise) kind. Code that tries to be overly-clever (of the "code golf" kind), was to be viewed with suspicion.