[_snydly]

>> And eventually I no longer think about code lines as an asset to be accumulated, but rather as an expenditure to be avoided.

Maybe I'm a bit odd, but I got into programming with code golf, using lots of J, K, and others. So my growth has been the opposite. It was just last year that I realized it's okay (and maybe necessary?) for other people to read/understand my scripts.

[siscia]

Even if slightly correlated I believe you are talking about a different issues and scale.

It is definitely good if other people can read your code, so you use great name convention and maybe add comments here and there, but is definitely better if people don't have to read your code because your code simply doesn't exist.

If you can achieve the same result with a careful design, a lot of hours of thinking and very few hours of typing, supposing that the design and the code is understandable by your peers, your code will be "more valuable" that if you achieved the same result with a lot of code.

Code is a liability is not ab asset.

[_snydly]

That's true, I shouldn't have compared my experience as a grad student in science to a project like Varnish.

> Code is a liability is not ab asset.

That's a great quote. I guess there's a sweet spot. Maybe, if only a handful of people need to be able to understand what you wrote, then the sweet spot can be skewed toward the terse end of the spectrum.

[lomnakkus]

> It was just last year that I realized it's okay (and maybe necessary?) for other people to read/understand my scripts.

Have you never found yourself in the position of not being able to read/understand your own code/scripts? (Though, I guess if it's so compact as K/J and very in-grained, I guess it might be possible to get the overview pretty quickly?)

Just FWIW, I'm in the position that other people definitely need to read/understand my code/scripts. After running git-blame I sometimes really hate past-me.