Brief is not simple

I am always keen to reduce the world into simple metaphors and proverbs. Big fan of "the emperor has no clothes" for example (and not only because H. C. Andersen was danish!), as it can be applied to so many things. Particularly, while we battle for the hearts and minds of the IT industry, advocating simplicity and denouncing ceremony, it seems to come in handy time and again.

Anyway, I was reading about Guava (thanks for the link Simon!), and stumbled upon one that was missing from my library: "brevity is the soul of wit". In the context of source code, you can imagine a snooty Perl hacker uttering this phrase after writing a particularly pleasing regular expression that no-one will ever be able to decode. However, I cannot think of anything less appealing in source code that brevity or wit. As a way of communicating, code is really best expressed simply, not briefly or cleverly.

Of course, outside the world of code I am a huge fan of folks who can be concise, thus.