Cleverness for it's own sake may be a bad thing, but cleverness in general isn't bad. The really important thing is that when you do something clever, you ensu

Cleverness for it's own sake may be a bad thing, but cleverness in general isn't bad. The really important thing is that when you do something clever, you ensure that people who use your clever function/module/library/webservice don't have to also understand your cleverness. Leaky abstractions can be worse than no abstraction. This is a bit of a tangent though. With respect to the micro level cleverness mentioned in the article: Simply naming the output of those helper functions would go a long way...