>My English teacher used to say “when you have to write an essay, write a first version. Then throw away everything but your conclusion and use that as the introduction of your real essay”
When you replace "conclusion" with "top level functions", this seems to work equally well, at least for myself, when writing (new) code.
All code could be constructed as a Perl one-liner. Or minified.
There is a point where reduction = obfuscation.
AFAIK, it's harder to hit that point using IRL organic languages, but TBH people abuse acronyms while coding. IANAL and YMMV, but just my 2 cents FYI - TMYK!
When you replace "conclusion" with "top level functions", this seems to work equally well, at least for myself, when writing (new) code.