Manlio -- You may be missing the point of my suggestion, which is to help people *find* code that suits them, rather than changing anyone's coding style. Optimizing code for one segment of readers is pessimizing it for another. Instead of dumbing down the smart code, I'd like to help your friends to help each other find dumber code, *and* to help others of us find smarter code.
If he really intended to promote some dumb code as a better alternative to some otherwise equivalent smart code, then I must have missed his point. For me, when people defend a practice with notions like "programmer needs be smarter/more responsible/better educated", that's like the institutional equivalent of a "code smell". You see it everywhere, too. C/C++ programmers will tell you its storage model is fine, just "programmer needs to be more ..." C's storage model does have its advantages, and smart code is presumably a good thing too. But for example, exercises like just stripping a function of extraneous parameter identifiers doesn't make it smart, while it may make it harder for someone to understand it at a glance. I do it myself, even though I claim to detest it, which may tell us something about the appeal of exercises like that. Go ahead and write smart, clearly the benefits outweigh the cost, but tell us that there's no cost, no problem here if a reader who knows Haskell has a hard time following? >> "institution smell." Donn