That's interesting. This is kind of what I do to understand and learn new codebases.

I have mostly been working in maintenance and rewrites from scratch, an in most places there's zero documentation, and the business rules are the law. So I often gotta document and copy. Sometimes it's stuff that has been abandoned for years, often in languages/frameworks I never saw before.

This "decompression" step is exactly what I do when I'm lost or in a hurry. I just inline inline inline everything so I can really grasp what's going on.

I have a terrible time understanding deep Java-OOP style abstractions, or Ruby-style meta-programming, even though I've been oscillating between those two worlds for 20 years.

But somehow the terrible abstraction-less inlined code is way easier for me to understand as a newcomer. I don't force it upon others though, and it's the first time I see someone else talking about it.

Actually I'm not being truthful, this John Carmack one crazy idea also follows a similar principle: http://number-none.com/blow/john_carmack_on_inlined_code.htm... . But I still feel like I'm alone with those people that do games like John Carmack, Casey Muratori or Jon Blow.

Anyone else is like this?