As you have to be cleverer to debug a piece of code than to write it there is a case to be made that production grade code should be rather boring to write, so as to remain maintainable.
This is why WordPress recommends a few things that annoy a lot of programmers, like using the longer if/while/foreach syntax and mixing PHP with HTML code. It's not elegant, but it's a lot more readable for people who haven't actually programmed much before. So that people whose knowledge of web coding is mostly HTML and CSS related can figure out what to edit without programming expertise or even syntax highlighting.
It's also one of the reasons WordPress (and quite a few other CMS systems that are sometimes looked down upon in the development world) caught on... because they were easy to modify and mess around with for people withot prior programming experience.
