[pracer]

"I am not employed to write programs for other users or to be read by programmers. Every user is different."

Well, unless you are the only programmer that company will ever has, you should write code that others can read and understand. Or if you are working in academia, then you can write as you like, but as a professional, you should write readable code for those coming after you.

[hnlmorg]

Devils advocate:

GP might work for a company working on a niche application (be it software or hardware) that requires code to be written like the aforementioned and anyone who specialises in that field is already adept in reading and writing code like that.

I'm not going to defend that choice of programming style for everywhere but software development is a broad industry where you do get pockets of people working on code that looks totally alien to others who are used to see C or ALGOL derived languages. Take LISP for example, there is LISP code in half of all European TVs shipped in the 90s. Forth is used in loads of places, even FreeBSD's bootloader is written in Forth. Machine code is almost completely unreadable for humans yet a massive chunk of software in the 80s was written using it.

My point is the industry might have standardised on a subset of syntax styles that seem readable to the lowest common denominator of developers but it's a massive industry with developers using all sorts of exotic languages effectively. Let's not go down the rabbit hole of saying they're doing it wrong because their code looks alien to you before you've understood the field in which that code is running in.

[laumars]

You’re losing karma for this but you’re right. It’s a massive industry and there are specialties out there writing code in languages that would look unreadable to your average web developer yet the code is well written and perfectly readable to those in the same specialty.

Sometimes I wonder if the only people who browse this site are JavaScript monkeys and Rust fanboys. There’s a whole spectrum of languages out there that looks nothing like C.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Check your assumptions. What if someone is not working as a programmer, not working in academia and not sharing programs with others, except in HN comments/submissions.

There was a story that appeared on HN many years ago and I wish I could find it again. It described a gentleman in Japan who did not work in the computer industry but did some sort of (let's call it) "optimisation work" on his own as a hobby. The story told that the work was being used by companies within the computer industry, I think it was hardware manufacturers. If I recall correctly he did not have any formalised education in computer science or mathematics. I am probably getting some details wrong; need to find this story again.