Going Dark (a response to Jeff Atwood)

I'm always skeptical when people equate elegant or clever algorithms with convoluted, unmaintainable trash. One reason is that the terms "elegant" and "clever" are so ambiguous and are frequently defined as "code that I cannot understand" by people that can't tell a closure from a case statement. Cleverness doesn't imply unnecessary obfuscation and complexity. In my own experience I'm constantly exposed to code that is completely lacking in cleverness, which makes it unnecessarily bloated, complex, unorganized, and redundant. Much of it can be deleted and rewritten with just a few lines of a little bit more "cleverly" crafted code, making it much easier on the mind and eyes. If it requires some developers to learn what "pattern matching" means, then this is a good thing.

It's just that I haven't had any experiences where some developer pulled out an obfuscated hack that he/she was proud of, calling it "clever", and having it cause maintenance problems. All of the maintenance problems I've come across have been from code that was decidedly not clever or elegant and not something I could imagine anyone being particularly proud of. Has anyone else run into this "cleverness" problem that I hear so much about yet never experienced? I read a lot of the “your hack may be clever but it doesn't make us money” fist-shaking from developer blogs. Maybe I just hang around the wrong developers. I do work for BigCo (only a month and a half left!), and so this is certainly a possibility. The words "enjoy" and "coding" are never used in the same sentence here.

hardly a response - more like a 'yeah, i agree'. i downvoted in my mind...