[ivanhoe]

IMHO it's a wrong approach. Every programming language, just like the spoken ones, has it's common shortcuts and idioms. The fact that they're commonly accepted and used is what makes them easy to understand. Your brain learns to recognize them quickly, often much quicker then the long version. With newbies and programmers who switched from other languages problem is that their brain is just not yet trained to do that efficiently. Instead of investing some time into getting used to the peculiarities of the language that they use, they then try to avoid them as "complicated". By lowering a bar too low, and avoiding using these patterns all together, you encourage people to never train their brains to recognize them effortlessly. And by definition of common patterns, they're, well, common, and they'll keep running into them all of the time. Also keep in mind that you're probably bothering others, more skilful ones, with unnecessarily verbose code which is to them harder to quickly scan through.

I'm not saying that one should go crazy with one-liners or uncommon patterns, but things like ternary operators used with reasonably short expressions in a single line of code are totally valid and should be readable to any average dev out there.

[majkinetor]

Great comment.

Particularly

> Also keep in mind that you're probably bothering others, more skilful ones, with unnecessarily verbose code which is to them harder to quickly scan through.

I stopped contributing to one Powershell repository because author thought that ps is hard and he wanted Get-Process. I put a "i am the greates babysiter meme" in PR and that was considered very disrespectful

Particulary

> Also keep in mind that you're probably bothering others, more skilful ones, with unnecessarily verbose code which is to them harder to quickly scan through.

[GFK_of_xmaspast]

> I put a "i am the greates babysiter meme" in PR and that was considered very disrespectful

Not sure I can think of too many situations where it would be otherwise.

[majkinetor]

In general context yes, but if you tell your top contributor that besides doing full day job work for entire year for free (while main author also has commercial offering) he should also babysit "dumb" users (making entire job not fun) and you get the tip multiple times that such behavior will alienate him from the project, you can be sure there is a way better approach to project management. Since I left it, the PRs and issues that nobody looks at started to pile up (I kept both at almost 0) which is extremely important given that project relies on constant PRs and reports by the community.

Here is the meme:

http://content.randomenthusiasm.com/d4ZEVg4VB.jpg

Not exactly profane I would say but what do I know ...

[moosingin3space]

Not profane, but condescending nonetheless and not appropriate in a professional/code review setting.

[majkinetor]

Its FOSS setting, not a professional setting. Being a jerk to people that do excelent stuff for your project for free is far from appropriate in any setting on the other hand.

[GFK_of_xmaspast]

Professionalism doesn't get left at the door at 5:00.

[coldtea]

>I put a "i am the greates babysiter meme" in PR and that was considered very disrespectful

Sounds like it was disrespectful too.

[nrjdhsbsid]

Your underlying assumption that everyone working on the code will be skilled is wrong in any large team. It's not like it takes a lot longer to read a 3 line if statement than a ternary operator.

Terse code isn't much faster to read, the difference between a 300 and 400 line file isn't significant.

Your attitude of "he isn't 1337 enough to understand my code" is the logic that leads to no comments and horrible to maintain code in the first place

[ivanhoe]

> It's not like it takes a lot longer to read a 3 line if statement than a ternary operator.

It doesn't take a lot longer to sit down and understand how ternary operators work, either. C'mon, it's not differential equations, it's just a notation, and a fairly simple one. It might take a newbie slightly more time at first to understand the logic. We've all been there once, you stop and stare at it for 15 minutes, but after a few times of deciphering it you get used to it. It's not about being 1337 (I surely hope that it's not what's considered elite this days), it's about learning new stuff and any averagely intelligent person can do it. Honestly, would you really hire someone who is not capable to (in a reasonable amount of time) teach him/herself how to read a ternary operator? What programming would that person be capable of doing in future?