[kpmah]

But, in the general case, who is this lowest common denominator programmer you are writing for? I can probably work out a few lines of terse Haskell more quickly than a page or two of boilerplate Java, because that's what I'm familiar with. Readable code is about pattern recognition, and everybody has a different set of patterns.

"Shakespeare for Dummies" works because English speakers tend to have a shared cultural familiarity that you can write for, but programmers typically don't.

That's not to say style isn't important. I'd say consistency is more important than any notion of simplicity, because once the reader has recognised a pattern they can re-recognise it quickly.