I think we've largely settled on "doing clever things is bad, actually." At least, I have. Your code should be obvious and self-documenting. Relying on languag

I think we've largely settled on "doing clever things is bad, actually." At least, I have. Your code should be obvious and self-documenting. Relying on language features to do a bunch of stuff behind the scenes more often leads to programs that are hard to debug and perform badly. How many times have you had to dig into C++ operator overloading compiler errors or someone being too clever with C macros (wait, that macro can return?!?) or someone overloading a Python built-in function in surprising ways. Coming across the short double example from the article in production code would make me groan. The "all sorts of uses for this kind of trick" the author lists sound like a nightmare for some poor employee to have to reverse-engineer five years from now. I feel modern languages (Rust, Go, Swift) have moved away from clever, implicit behavior in favor of more considered and explicit code-efficiency mechanisms. For example making error handling (? error operator in Swift & Rust) an explicit first-class citizen, rather than some clever macro hacking; or the trend away from operator overloading and complicated class structures and towards explicitly declared interfaces; or the many restrictions on Rust macros[1] to help ensure they're maintainable. [1] https://veykril.github.io/tlborm/decl-macros/minutiae/hygiene.html https://veykril.github.io/tlborm/decl-macros/minutiae/hygien... and related sections