[bradleyland]

It's a play on words. Obviously the authors of that code weren't making a real attempt at obfuscation, but they did so unintentionally. I've observed this myself plenty of times, and it's not limited to open source.

Programmers earn their paycheck (literally and figuratively speaking) by being smart. Hence, programmers value smarts.

I don't read nearly as much Python as I do Ruby, so when I speak, I'm speaking of the Ruby I've read. Ruby programmers use a lot of clever idioms. In a lot of cases, they make things more intuitive. In other cases, they make you scratch your head and wonder just what the hell is going on. This is usually a case where a programmer has picked up an idiom that they found clever, then used it in a scenario where the code actually becomes less clear. This is what the author is pointing out.

[wccrawford]

Then perhaps the author should take his own advice. Using words to mean what you want instead of what everyone else means isn't a good way to get your point across. It's even worse than bad code, since it's deliberately wrong.