Just to codify this with some examples: Here’s some recent examples of what I consider “clever” that I’ve had to work with from previous people and that I’ve wr

Just to codify this with some examples: Here’s some recent examples of what I consider “clever” that I’ve had to work with from previous people and that I’ve written myself: Someone who loved Lisp wrote a bunch of the unit test suites where I work using Python in a very clever metaprogramming way. They would dynamically generate and attach functions to a test object for testing REST requests. This is both 1. Difficult to read and understand 2. Much more difficult to test the behavior of All to save probably maybe 100 lines of code. This is an example where I feel like code is too clever for its own good without having a good reason to be like that. It also flies in the face of what you would conventionally expect when it comes to Python unit test suites. One example where sometimes it’s necessary to be clever: I did a db migration in about 100 lines of Python/SQL that worked fine at small scale using Alembic/Python/SQL and was a straightforward update with CTE. When tested on large production grade dataset however it completely fell apart. Some clever hacks with batching and temp table later and I have something runnable, but now it’s all in sql and while well commented is much harder to grok what’s going on at first glance.