This code probably represents how the Romans thought about numbers.

So many of the "best practies" solutions people are voting on seem like just plain bad coding to me. Sure, they are clever but they are often a bunch of jammed up code that take a bit to read and figure out what's really going on. Why do people vote this for best practice?

The highest rated and most clever really don't seem to be best practice. They are always harder to read.
Lines of code are cheap.