The knockdown test for too clever is that the original author can't maintain or extend the code later on. You can use this phenomenon to prove to people that t

The knockdown test for too clever is that the original author can't maintain or extend the code later on. You can use this phenomenon to prove to people that they were being too clever. "See? not so easy, and this is all your doing" Beyond that there is a a tradeoff to be had between utilizing powerful and expressive language features, and alienating less proficient programmers. In industry, redundancy and parallelism (of humans) matters a lot, and so the code has to be dumbed down quite a bit. If you're working solo or with a few highly competent peers, you can afford more cleverness.