Verbosity in Teaching, Translating and Coding

Ever since teaching myself how to code, I have repeatedly run into the idea of verbosity. A lot of the most common arguments boil down to something like:

- Make sure your code is DRY - Make sure your code is as clean as possible - Leave good comments; not too many and not too few (or don't comment at all!) - Make sure other developers can work on your code - Use functional programming! - Be verbose! - As long as the code works, it's fine - Use object-oriented programming! - Don't be verbose

This leaves me scratching my head a bit.

As somebody who has taught myself a foreign language, and also taught myself how to code, I think verbosity is a good thing, or dare I say, a great thing?

Education is not just going to school, studying a subject, and passing an exam. It's enabling other people to see the world in a new way; a way that has grown and developed into a comprehensive set of principles and ideas that you yourself already use, with success, to navigate daily life. A great educator knows how to parse the information that they already obtained in a way that makes it easy for other people to also obtain said information.

There are extra layers and nuances to teaching any subject; empathy and patience and all of the other social skills that make somebody personable are great helpers when teaching. Experience in learning a subject from scratch in your own life also helps you identify sticking points, or figure out ways that make concepts click.

So why do we bend over backwards with odd rules and beliefs about verbosity in code? What do we gain by consistent abstraction, cleaning away comments, using one type of programming over another?

At the end of the day, if your goal is for the future you, or your future teammate, or anybody else you can think of to read your code, understand it, and begin to work with it, then I think we can lean into more verbosity, rather than less.