I don't consider that man particularly wise. Clever has many different axes. Compare debugging something like git or hg (clever, simple data structure) to cvs

I don't consider that man particularly wise. Clever has many different axes. Compare debugging something like git or hg (clever, simple data structure) to cvs or svn (non-clever, standard data structure). Systems like git and hg don't just do more; they're also far more debuggable thanks to clever. That's not an IOCCC type of cleverness, but a deep, deep clever. Likewise, consider general-purpose data stores (such as a KVS or an RDBMS) compared to a one-off data structures mapping directly to your data. The design of the original RDBMS was hyper-clever. A wise man knows when to be clever and when not to be clever. I don't know of any programming language designer who can make that determination for me; it's too domain-specific. If you can rely on programmers to not be clever for inane reasons, you can allow them to be clever for architecturally-critical reasons.