Great post. I will say, while I rarely do things in a "magic" way just for the sake of it, I often do it to understand how something works, which, admittedly,

Great post. I will say, while I rarely do things in a "magic" way just for the sake of it, I often do it to understand how something works, which, admittedly, may be just as bad. A good example is using generators in python; While writing a program I happened to be reading about generators, so I decided to incorporate them into my code, thinking that doing so would help me understand them better. It worked fine and I understood it at the time, but now if I were to go back and muck with that code, I'd probably have to brush-up on generators just to make changes that didn't break the whole thing. So I guess my point is, another valid reason, beyond "doing it just because you can", is "doing it so you can learn". However, the end result seems about the same to me.