Back when I wrote C and C++ for a living I'd occasionally meet someone who thought their ability to employ the spiral rule or parse a particularly dense template construct meant they were a genius. I get the same vibe from certain other groups in this industry, most recently from functional programmers and Rust afficionados, for example. Nobody gives a damn if you can narrate a C spiral or a functional-like Rust idiom.

And this syntax density is one of the reasons I stopped advocating for the use of Rust in our systems. First, I don't want to work with languages that attract this kind of person. Second, I don't want to work with languages that require a relatively heavy cognitive load on simply reading the lines of the source code. Units of code (i.e. statements, functions, structures and modules) are already a cognitive load--and the more important one. Any extra bit I have to supply to simply parsing the symbols is a distraction.

"You get used to it," "with practice it fades to the background," etc. are responses I've seen in these comments, and more generally when this issue comes up. They're inaccurate at best, and often simply another way the above mentioned "geniuses" manifest that particular personality flaw. No, thank you. I'll pass.