Noted! Thanks for replying as well, and I would definitely be in favor of more rating categories.

I actually found myself 'looking' for them intuitively when I recently joined the site.

Another thing I noticed that you also mention is the difference between languages and the fact that just because someone is solving a kata in Python, that doesn't mean they know or care about Python conventions. Especially in the earlier kyus I assume, since they might be used to their other languages' conventions more.

Take that together with how programmers at different levels have different priorities and the fact that a 3rd kyu in Java might have decided to take up a new language and solve some 7th kyu katas first, and you have a beautiful mess of all kinds of solutions.

Anyway, I'll just keep all this in mind and go at it step by step.

Ok, wow, thank you once again for your comprehensive reply! Your reply really gave me some insight from a broader perspective.

I'll make sure to keep it in mind and try to aim for such a level of fluency myself :)

Thank you for replying! I will stick to the books' guidelines for now then for my own sake (don't break the rules until you've mastered them and all that), but would you mind explaining a bit more why an experienced programmer might like a different style more?

It could help me understand the solutions better if I knew where the experts are coming from.

Cheers

[Honest Question here]

Why are all the top kata solutions so 'hackery'? Like good job for getting it in one line, but who would ever want to read or debugg THAT code??

Is hackery code a lower kyu thing?
Is it a codewars thing?
Or, and I really hope this isn't true, but is it maybe an industry-wide phenomenon?

I'm a n00b, so if the above opinion is seriously wrong for some reason, by all means, please correct me. It's just that so far, every single resource I've used to study has hammered on the importance of readability, following the style guides, using proper, easy-to-understand names for things, etc.

And as a learner especially, it'd be great if I could wrap my head around the top answers without having the decrypt the freaking variable names first.