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I feel this way about code. Writing things by hand is the quickest way for me to fully understand it, and that is what I am paid to do, to understand it. It will be executed millions and millions of times for every time it is modified, so even if writing it by hand is 10x or 100x as slow, it is still a better payoff.

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I think here the question is what is the goal? If the goal of the code is to learn and teach, then understandability is critical. If the goal to efficiently produce useful software, then that is not necessarily the case, because the end-users could not care less if the code is understandable. They just want it to work. And maybe understandability and "working" are correlated, but not necessarily.

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