I'll go even further and say this is essentially the only form of readability I care about. The article talks about things like "unnecessary one-liners" with th

I'll go even further and say this is essentially the only form of readability I care about. The article talks about things like "unnecessary one-liners" with the ternary operator as an example. I don't care at all about one-liners, whether or not they're immediately understandable. If I'm trying to understand how to find a fix a bug or add a feature, then if, as the author did, assume that the obvious bad code things like meaningless variable names and spaghetti control flow aren't there, then the only hard problem is "where in the code does this thing happen". Make that problem easy to solve, and I can spare the 10 seconds it takes to understand a ternary operator. Hell, I can spare the 10 minutes it takes to understand some weird nested list comprehension. Stick a comment telling me what you're doing, and I may not even need to bother. The same is true with low-level optimizations. If you need to do something clever, then comment it, and we're fine. Obviously one shouldn't go overboard, but I don't see anything wrong with the kind of premature optimization in which the programmer sits down and immediately knows of a fast way and a slow way to do something and chooses the fast way (within reason, of course, and that's a subjective judgment, but it's one I'm OK with). Basically, make your code easy to approach. Make it as easy as possible for me to go from, "I need to change what happens when the user does X" to finding the code that governs that behavior. If all that code is in one tidy little location, then aside from the obvious need for good variable names, sensible whitespace, etc., write it however you like. I'll figure it out.