[iSnow]

Once he gets older and a bit more mellow, he'll see that there are always people who are better - and you can recognize them. Also that it just makes sense to stick to some methodologies to find common ground, to keep your code readable by everyone in the team.

Having a desk job helps in understanding it is more important that you can understand your code 3 years down the road than squeeze the last 5% of productivity out right now.

[cyphunk]

that assumes you have the same desk looking at the same code in 3 years. otherwise writing code however you like may have its benefits. including giving you less other-humanly-end-points to have to consider at work. but this attitude may also force you into freelance work sooner than expected though.

[waps]

I find that when it comes to optimizing code with an emphasis on readability, the improvement is rarely only 5%. Plus the improvement is not just the end result's performance, but also in writing.

I think I don't understand this readability thing. I have trouble keeping the structure of large programs in my head. So for me, the number one readability property of a program is it's length. The shorter, the quicker I can read it.

For other people it seems to be a lot more about code they don't understand. List and dict comprehensions are one such thing, especially the iterator-based ones. Using variable capture with in-line functions is another, and God forbid I pass around a function pointer to an inner function, because it often lets me avoid writing an entire pointless class that I have to remember exists. I use functional programming constructs constantly where they make sense, which tends to be a lot of places. Why is all this forbidden ? Is this because people don't know what they do/how powerful these constructs can be ? I feel that rewriting a nested list comprehension into a 20 line function does absolutely nothing to clarify matters for me, it makes things worse.