The first developer I ever worked with was very explicit, and I learned some important lessons from him. He had created a system in PHP that controlled printers

The first developer I ever worked with was very explicit, and I learned some important lessons from him. He had created a system in PHP that controlled printers and it was very explicit. He didn't know what a function was, his code had no functions. It was a 5000 line script that would run on a Windows timer, top to bottom. In some places the control structures were nested 17 deep, I counted; an if-statement inside an if-statement inside a while-loop inside a for-loop inside an if-statement inside a for-loop inside an if-statement, etc, 17 deep. The cyclomatic complexity was in the thousands. I never could understand that code. I know it wasn't brief, does that mean it was explicit? I think the truth is brevity and explicitness are orthogonal. Let me ask you this: can code be both brief and explicit? What would that look like?