>In 35 years I have never seen such a thing as self-explanatory code. Does not exist.

Nobody's pertefc.

I'd go with the next best thing - the code which is clear to the guy who needs to maintain it, and doesn't lead him to wrong conclusions about how it works, contains no misnomers, no dead code, and doesn't use esoteric tricks (or explains them in clear language).

I know things that throw me off when reading code I am supposed to fix:

- code which never really worked yet nobody told me so - I waste thirty minutes trying to figure how and it just won't

- unused variables, code in blocks which never execute (the condition is never met)

- variables initialized elsewhere, with cryptic or wrong names

- obsolete or just plain wrong comments

The rest, like "if x=.t." and other unnecessary pieces of code, bad formatting, ten-line screen concatenations instead of textmerge, not normalized long logical expressions - that is only annoying but not an obstacle.