alt Hacker NewsThis feels like a lot of rationalization for the purpose of excusing writing exactly the sort of code that Kernighan advised against.
Advising against writing complex code is not advising against learning.
The person who solves a hard problem correctly using simple code has generally spent more time learning than the person who solves it using complex code.
Yes, I agree this is true in some (many?) cases. But it is also true that sometimes the more complex solution is better, either for performance reasons or because it makes things simpler for users/API callers.