This reminds me of when I was learning perl.

At first, I thought it looked like line noise. $var on the left of the = sign? Constructs like $_ and @_? more obscure constructs were worse.

But I had to keep going and then one day something happened. It was like one of those 3d stereograms where your eyes have to cross or uncross. The line noise became idioms and I just started becoming fluent in perl.

I liked some of it too - stuff like "unless foo" being more a readable/human of saying if not foo.

perl became beautiful to me - it was the language I thought in, and at the highest level. I could take an idea in my mind and express it in perl.

But I had some limits. I would restrain myself on putting entire loops or nested expression on one line just to "save space".

I used regular expressions, but sometimes would match multiple times instead of all in one giant unreadable "efficient" expression.

and then, I looked at other people's perl. GAH! I guess other people can "express themselves in perl", but rarely was it beautiful or kind, it was statistically worse and closer to vomit.

I like python now. more sanity, (somewhat) more likely that different people will solve a problem with similar and/or readable code.

by the way, very powerful article (even if I intensely dislike the code)