Yeah - the nurble method. It's really the Clojure that looks the worst. Taking just the boolean query to figure out whether the word is in the noun list, I'd p

Yeah - the nurble method. It's really the Clojure that looks the worst. Taking just the boolean query to figure out whether the word is in the noun list, I'd place them in this order from simplest to understand through to most obfuscated Python: if word not in NOUNS Java: if (!nouns.contains(word)) PHP: if(!in_array($word, $nouns)) Ruby: if not @@nouns.include? word Clojure: if (not (some (partial = word) nouns)) The Python is pretty much just english The Java is almost english except for the ! PHP is starting to get more obtuse - ! and $ and you have to know the order of the parameters Ruby (from the article) has @@ and ? but isn't too bad - might go above the php Clojure is just weird - looking at the others, I reckon a person could easily modify and write a similar program without knowing much of the language. With Clojure I think it requires deeper understanding. I haven't included your Ruby in that list because it's doing a different (much neater :) ) thing.