> Boilerplate - repeated pattern - helps orient a reader. The more familiar it is, the easier it is to understand. Every layer of abstraction increases the diff

> Boilerplate - repeated pattern - helps orient a reader. The more familiar it is, the easier it is to understand. Every layer of abstraction increases the difficulty in understanding. I really, really think that there's something about learning imperative languages that breaks our brains in some way. Because, I've heard people argue that theSum = 0 theArray.each do |n| theSum += n end is easier to read than theSum = theArray.sum which seems utterly crazy. Even worse, I've had people take correct functional-style code and make it "more readable" by expanding it out into a bunch of boilerplate, and fail to notice the typos and logic errors they introduced in the process. People don't actually read boilerplate code; they do a visual pattern match on it. If the pattern is close enough, they accept the code as correct even if there's a small error that they didn't notice.