I think there are two types of clever. There's the type of cleverness that shows off too complex a solution or intricate knowledge of a particular system in a

I think there are two types of clever. There's the type of cleverness that shows off too complex a solution or intricate knowledge of a particular system in a less portable way. It's fanciful and surprising and is a mess to maintain later. People who employ that cleverness for anything other than toy example code meant as a curiosity are employing the bad sort of clever programming. Then there's the sort of cleverness that makes a leap that becomes a new idiom over time. It's not immediately apparent before you've seen it, but it's deceptively effective and looks really obvious in hindsight. Some of those idioms are local to an organization or vertical to an industry or language community. Some are so elegant that they jump from one community to another. The "Orcish Maneuver" or using !! to force a variable into a 1 or 0 to approximate a boolean are some examples that come to mind. Yes, someone was doing something clever the first time something like those was done. When an example is seen it's simple enough to recognize and understand, though. It turns out to be useful and becomes a common and understood to be almost straightforward way to do things. That's the sort of cleverness to which one should aspire. That sort of obvious in hindsight elegance is what's truly clever.