I totally agree, it’s about proving you’re clever rather than communicating ideas. Maybe for something hard like Linux kernel development this is a good thing but in most cases it just leads to messy code that people can’t understand or follow.
While there certainly are such cases, I think here it’s just about being proficient in a language. Pointers, referencing and dereferencing are the bread and butter of any C code, and applying them in a way to reduce complexity is certainly something to strive for - if this isn’t readable then I’d argue the reader shouldn’t be touching the codebase anyways.
Fortunately or unfortunately you don’t always get to decide who touches the code, so unless performance is a concern as it is in kernel development optimising like this in the day job will eventually lead people making mistakes. Basically I say be as explicit and clear as you dare, even at the cost of some CPU cycles.
I've written code like the first example many times, and I always felt a little "dirty" for doing it - I could tell there had to be some way to avoid treating head as a special case, but I was too lazy to actually work out how. The author of the second example may be "clever", but he also didn't give up.
Many Programmers who don't use C are afraid of pointers and prefer superficially simpler (but overall more complicated) things like Java's abstraction towers, despite the extra expense.
