This is an interesting little post. The bottom line is that highly readable code is better, on average and in "normal" situations, than the greatest hacks. This is also why COBOL is still the most dominant language for business. There's more new COBOL code being written than any other language outside of C. And before anyone gets all defensive you should know that Object Oriented COBOL is more OOP than C++ not to forget the power of data manipulation that is unsurpassed in any other language. Now it's true that you can write horrible spaghetti code in COBOL. But it's much easier to write readable code than in C or Java or especially perl.