Ask HN: What's your opinion, implicit vs. explicit?
The Zen of Python states "Explicit is better than implicit."
In [this article](http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html), PG states that "Anything that can be implicit, should be." The context is about the brevity of code.
In general, I'm a fan of brevity, but I also dislike overly complicated code - by that I mean, code that is difficult to read. I'd like to hear opinions and ideas about how you balance these opposing ideas when you're writing code. My personal context is the Python language.
Code is read much more often than it is written. I'll take something verbose and explicit over something magical and brief any day of the week. It's why I'm preferring Elixir to Ruby for any side projects. Elixir is so explicit about how everything works. There's little magic happening behind the scenes.
Explicit, explicit, explicit. I'll take readability over brevity any day (and twice on Sundays) and I believe relying on implicit behavior and various forms of "black magic" hurts readability. Saving a few keystrokes for the sake of saving keystrokes is a false economy if it makes the code harder to read for the next poor sap who comes along and has to read it (which, guess what, may be the poor sap who wrote it in the first place!).