[report-to-trees]

I think these stories and aversion to "clever" code end up hurting programmers overall. I wish we spent more time teaching how to choose the correct time and place to be clever instead. Searching for ways to make things better instead of mindlessly copy pasting how it was done by the person before me is how I learned my most valuable skills.

[Verdex]

It doesn't help that we don't have a good definition for what 'clever' means when referring to code.

This article talks about a time someone made an abstract class and then took DRY a little too far. If this is an example of 'being clever' then anyone using map instead of writing a for-loop would have to be at gaussian levels of cleverness.

[Also a class generator is implied to be less clever than an abstract class ... I'm not sure I can accept the usage of 'clever' in the article as meaningful.]

[PartiallyTyped]

I agree.

A new pattern may seem "clever" or "difficult" if you haven't encountered it before; but if you spend time with it and work with it, it can look like the most natural thing in the world.

[_iostreamer_]

I am not sure if teaching this skill would help or is possible.

But I do agree with the direction of your thought. The reading material at least needs to be inherently balanced rather than writing itself getting balanced out by 50% of articles talking about "Using proxies to prevent null pointer errors"(guilty of writing this) and the other half being "Maybe proxies are a bad idea".

[AnimalMuppet]

Cleverness in the right place is good and useful. Cleverness in the wrong place is stupidity wearing nicer clothes.