Book "python programming patterns". anybody read this??

[Roy Smith]

Gordon McMillan <gmcm at hypernet.com> wrote:
> I am a long-time Pythoneer and a very long-time programmer, and I had to 
> study many of the examples carefully before understanding how they 
> worked.

I havn't seen the book, but I have to wonder about the above.  Over the 25 
or so years I've been programming, I've gradually shifted my priorities 
from elegance, cleverness, and efficiency, to simplicity and ease of 
understanding.  We do a lot of code review at work, and I'm always the guy 
at the meetings arguing for rewriting it so it's easier to understand.

It seems to me that if somebody is experienced in both algorithms and in 
the particular language a program is written in still has to study the code 
carefully to figure out what it's doing, it's probably not very good code.