I can half-agree with this, but I would measure it differently.
It's not the words themselves that are surprising, but the range of language features used.
I have a friend who produces particularly readable (TypeScript) code - at least in my opinion. For a long time I couldn't figure out what was so special about it, then it dawned on me that he simply doesn't use the more fancy and recent features of the language - by recent I mean stuff that came out in the last four years or so.
I wouldn't be so radical in my approach, but I believe feature usage should obey a power law, with more advanced parts occurring less frequently. I'm sure there's a balance to be struck between terseness and using as minimal a subset of the language as possible.
Also it doesn't hurt to have whitespace here and there. We use paragraphs in written speech for a reason.
It's not the words themselves that are surprising, but the range of language features used.
I have a friend who produces particularly readable (TypeScript) code - at least in my opinion. For a long time I couldn't figure out what was so special about it, then it dawned on me that he simply doesn't use the more fancy and recent features of the language - by recent I mean stuff that came out in the last four years or so.
I wouldn't be so radical in my approach, but I believe feature usage should obey a power law, with more advanced parts occurring less frequently. I'm sure there's a balance to be struck between terseness and using as minimal a subset of the language as possible.
Also it doesn't hurt to have whitespace here and there. We use paragraphs in written speech for a reason.