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by rabidrat 1917 days ago
Yes. We have this notion that code should be understandable to a junior dev with no context and only 90 seconds to understand what the function does. But for a complex system, it would take a lot longer to communicate what's going on in such simple terms, and you would wind up being much more verbose and/or repeating yourself everywhere, which then becomes an impediment to a fluent dev who has been working with the system for months and already has the context.

You need that higher-level clarity in code so that you can still work with abstractions and not have to dive into every function at a code-level, but when working inside a function or a deeply technical area, it's reasonable to expect a developer to spend some time reading the code and coming up with a mental execution model, which is purest when it comes directly from the code in the form that works, and makes sense to the people who actively need to maintain it.