> As tempting as it is to do something super clever and cram a ton of functionality into a small number of lines or characters (it does feel good), it's just better to be a bit more verbose and write simple, obvious code.

I find fluent style often clearer as well as more terse than with superfluous intermediate variables. Verbosity isn't the same thing as clarity.

(But in Python, comprehensions/genexps are often clearer than either.)