This is an excellent example of why comments in code are so very useful, helpful and in my opinion, necessary. ... nobody at Microsoft ever understood how the code worked (much less still understood it), and that most of the code was completely uncommented, we simply couldn't figure out why the collision detector was not working. Heck, we couldn't even find the collision detector! To all those folks out there who kee…
It's an argument for clear code that's readily understandable by other people. It's not an argument for any particular technique for achieving that goal. I've never seen any programmer seriously suggest that code should be deliberately made difficult to understand.
Then you've not worked with some of the people I've worked with. The clever "it was hard to write, it should be hard to read" mantra has been thrown out by a few ex-colleagues trying to be clever, and a couple of them really meant it. Whether it was a hatred for others, or a misguided attempt at "job security", I'll never know, but some of these people do exist.
Often, however, the same effect is had under the guise of "clever hacks" - look how clever and awesome I am! What? Of course everyone else can read and understand this (they just have to understand that I compiled this with my own custom-built compiler I rolled myself on gentoo so I could squeeze out an extra .0001% improvement!)