Which is better coding style?

Is better to code
1. In a way can be readable easily on first sight but maybe inefficient
or
2. That is very efficient and short but more complicated to read and understand

My instructor (a very scary prof) always tells us to go to option #1. Yes you can still do option #2 if you provider enough comments to explain.

But if you do option #1, you will not need to comment alot about your code because your code will speak for itself because of its easy readability.

What do you think?

Semantics semantics LOL!

HTML would need 10 times more tags if we were to get to any decent semantics standards. Anyways, who the fuck cares for semantics? You're not to read HTML yourself, it's your browser what does, so it might as well be a binary format. In fact, when it came out, I was so pissed at the 25% bandwidth wastage for not being binary.