I have pretty mixed feelings about this. Personally I find it much easier to debug code that:

1) fits entirely on my screen and

2) doesn't involve much state modification

Every intermediate variable is a chance for me to miss some modification (e.g. it was passed to a func that modifies its arguments) and consequently misunderstand what is happening.

I've been experimenting in Python with the function chaining style of coding enabled by the toolz library. So while not at all idiomatic, the example in the original article would come out as something like this:

https://gist.github.com/ZeroBomb/8ac470b1d4b02c11f2873c5d4e0...

I would say that function-chaining this example would constitute over-engineering, but I have found that writing in this style has really helped me express pretty complex function composition in a way that is still concise without using a bunch of intermediate variables.