In general, if I need to maintain someone else's code, what I see the most important is that the author's intent is expressed clearly. Whether it is clever-and-compressed code or simple-and-verbose code seems a secondary issue. Longer code that has too much details (such as too many names for intermediate variables) could obscure the intent of the author, and I'd rather prefer clever code to it as far as it's intent is clear, for I can make it black-box in my mind while I'm reading the whole and only analyze it lazily as needed.