alt Hacker NewsOne of my professors in undergrad said: the most dangerous mathematicians are the ones that begin the proof with "Consider a case ...". He said that these mathematicians are the ones who don't share anything about how they got the case and they end up projecting this sort of "magician aura". I don't know how accurate that assessment it, but I think it captures something that never sat well with me.
In my life, I've never liked people who deliberately polish up their articulation to the level that it obfuscates how they arrived at that understanding (whether it's academics or engineers). They might not do it for attention and they might not be doing it knowingly. IMO, they are taking away the opportunity of learning from the people they are talking to. For me the conversation is one sided. I'm there to listen, but rarely can I ask questions, give feedback or grow from where they have possibly reached.
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"So I was thinking about #####'s Law this morning, and I realized that #######'s Theorem might apply if we do this and ignore that. Then I went up a blind alley and stopped for coffee and realized I was overcomplicating it, we don't care about negative or imaginary solutions."
They don't need to know I was brushing my teeth and thinking of bacon and an argument I had with my spouse right before I thought that though. Or how rude the customer in front of me was to the new barista who was just trying her best.
I personally stumble upon many topics where I only care about the what. In that case all the theory is just a distraction I'm just wading through to get to the point. If it's optional, then looking into the how and why is certainly nice, but it should be part of an appendix or a commentary and not interspersed within the proof unless an uncommented version exists.
OTOH polishing up the presentation can really improve the experience of a first-time reader of the work (e.g. your code reviewers). If the polishing is done with good intent and proficiency you can make something that was very convoluted and difficult to arrive at digestible with far less effort. It also aids your own understanding: "If we can reduce it to the freshman level that means we really understand it" (or similar I didn't look up the exact quote, attributed to Feynman). If you're polishing something up to make it understandable that's totally different than polishing it up to make yourself seem smart, right?
Ugh, let's take a step back and make a distinction:
I don't need your fluff. No one cares how you arrived writing another crud line to save an object to database or sent yet another AJAX call.
If you wrote some genuine great compression algorithm that's a different take on compression, I would like to see step by step reasoning and eventual dead ends.