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2010... There must be an engineer somewhere right now, who's trying to fix some bug in this guy's legacy code, muttering "why" each time one of these "smart" patterns comes up in the codebase.

I know from experience, that the temptation is great to be smart in your code, but after all these years my rule of thumb is: whenever you feel that you're doing something particularly clever, it's probably a bad idea.

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There's a good quote that I look at once in a while to remind myself to not be too smart.

> Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. — Brian Kernighan and P. J. Plauger in The Elements of Programming Style.

Debugging isn't too bad if you can put in good trace code that can be switched in or switched out and left in with minimal overhead/risk.

Though it may add say 20% time to typing the code in, but it can also serve as a kind of commenting.

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