[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.