[icsa]

I think that "It's what I'm used to." is the main reason - intellectual comfort zone.

Having learned BASIC, FORTRAN and Pascal, C seemed like line noise - at first. As did PERL. And then k.

Btw, COBOL seemed "too verbose".

Once I actually started writing many k programs and then reading even more of them, I was able to recalibrate for the abstraction/density. I moved my intellectual comfort zone. Ironically, I was already there with mathematics. However, programming languages were different :).

Now, as a result, every time I have to read Java, I suffer from a kind of fatigue - having to read way too much code to glean the writer's intent. I just want them to get to the F'ing point.

N.B. - Mathematical literature/writing went through this same transition during the Renaissance. Equations were described in natural language (not unlike COBOL). A simple polynomial could require a paragraph of text to describe.