[joshuamorton]

>It's simply a matter of fact that, unless the hidden details are very simplistic, abstract concepts with no edge cases, terseness hinders readability.

No. Using the correct abstractions helps readability.

I'll agree with you that a complicated SQL statement may not be a good thing to use, but it also probably isn't the right abstraction.

Compare, on the other hand, using numpy/matlab/Julia vs. something like ND4J.

Its the difference between `y = a * x + b` in the former, and `y = a.mmul(x).add(b)`. Granted the ND4J version isn't terrible, but I used an older similar library in Java that only provided staticmethod, so it was `y = sum(mmul(a, x), b)`, which is fine when you're only working with two operations, but gets really ugly really fast when you want to do something remotely more complicated.

And I'll even note that all three of these are already highly abstracted. If you want to drop all semblance of abstraction, keep in mind that that `y = a * x + b` works equally well if `a` is matrix and x a vector, or `a` a vector and `x` a scalar, and separately it doesn't matter if `b` is a vector or a scalar. They'll get broadcast for you.

Overly terse code does indeed hinder readability. But so does overly verbose code. Its much more difficult to understand what is happening in

    outputValue = sumVectors(
        multiplyColumnVectorByMatrix(
            inputValue, weightsMatrix),
        broadCastScalar(
            biasValue, size(inputValue)))

than it is in `out = weights * in + bias`, even though the second is significantly more terse.

[TimJYoung]

I don't know, your example seems perfectly understandable and easy to read to me. The naming is pretty good and descriptive, so anyone can understand what's going on pretty quickly.

That doesn't mean that a DSL or higher level language feature might not be better (the operations are pretty clear and not prone to edge cases, as I said before), but as far as "big problems" go, I find that example to be a pretty minor one.

[joshuamorton]

My example was small but illustrative. If instead of implementing a single linear transform, you're implementing a whole neural network, or a complex statistical model or something, it will be much easier to grok the 10 line implementation than the 150 line one.

That means less surface area for typos, bugs, etc. This compounds if you ever want to go back and modify existing code.