Clear is better than clever [pdf]
It's interesting that the comparator function is one of the examples, because that's something which shows how people often confuse verbose with clear; I think it's best written in a single line:    return a  b ? 1 : 0;

That's one line, compared with the 10(!) of his proposed method using a switch statement. Having worked with some "modern" codebases, I think verbosity is a bigger problem that's become especially prevalent recently, since the idea of making a simple thing simple is so enticing and easy, but emphasising "micro-readability" to that extent (that's 10 lines of code for two simple decisions) will bloat the code and make "macro-readability" harder, and it's the latter that really matters for the understanding of complex software.Anyone who has the experience of reading lots of highly trivial functions like those, and gotten the feeling "I've read a lot of code, and I understand what each little bit does, but what is the whole thing trying to do?" That's a symptom of excessive verbosity.To offer another (subjective) point, I think the lack of semicolons or other statement delimiters does make code harder to read, as it makes it look similar to a run-on sentence. Natural languages have punctuation for a similar reason --- you can quickly scan over sentences by finding their delimiters.Also, the counterargument: https://www.linusakesson.net/programming/kernighans-lever/in...