>> As a computer science grad student with years of industry experience under his belt, Karpinski was far from a programming novice. He knew how to build softwa

>> As a computer science grad student with years of industry experience under his belt, Karpinski was far from a programming novice. He knew how to build software. Probably was coding as a kid. And according to his resume his first professional (money paid) part-time job was in 1996, coding in C/ALGOL/C++/Perl. That is close to 20 years. Reasonable enough. People tend to keep it simple and not design overly complicated things when they've been doing something for 20 years. A style guide page here gives a good feel of the language: http://julia.readthedocs.org/en/latest/manual/style-guide/ http://julia.readthedocs.org/en/latest/manual/style-guide/ Compare with Python: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/ http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/ And, say, Ocaml: http://caml.inria.fr/resources/doc/guides/guidelines.en.html http://caml.inria.fr/resources/doc/guides/guidelines.en.html