The Cost of Cleverness

Every clever trick is a small bet that no one else will ever need to touch this code. The bet almost always loses.

There is a particular pleasure in a tight one-liner — the kind that makes a reviewer say 'nice.' Note that 'nice' is a different word than 'clear.'

The discipline is to choose the boring version anyway, and to save your cleverness for the places where the problem itself is genuinely hard.