While I generally agree with your sentiments here, and this is a somewhat pedantic response, with regard to the following:

The goal of code, however, is simply to communicate a process to a computer. Or rather, when that process is subject to change over time, to communicate a process to a computer, simply.

I would tend to disagree. Code is not about communicating with a computer. It is about communicating with humans. The computer does not care how the code is written - it is the humans that have difficulty with it. In a way, programming is the translation of a language that the computer understands into a form that humans can comprehend. Not so much the other way around. In this regard, clever is fine for a computer, but it is not always understandable to a human.