[retrocryptid]

I would argue you can be clever in one place if it lowers the overall complexity of the code.

In the Lisp community, we try to be "clever by composition" and not "clever by subclassing" and... it makes code where you have to have more than one thing in mind at a time, but if you can do that it's often MUCH simpler than subclasses.

A practical example might be a collections "class" (actually just a few functions) in old-school lucid lisp to do the same thing Java/Smalltalk collections did. Instead of subclassing for Set, Dictionary, OrderedCollection, etc. We had an "insert" function that could call functions to see if we could insert a particular element and where to insert it if we could. If you wanted Set semantics, you returned false from the first function if the element was in the collection. If you wanted OrderedCollection semantics, you did a binary search to find where to insert the element.

It worked well if you were the type of programmer who couldn't remember the Collections class hierarchy semantics but could remember how to write two functions. I'm sure we had a few helper functions for common cases.

It's not a panacea, but every now and again you can lower the overall complexity by raising the complexity of a small portion of code. It is, as the author has discovered, hard to figure out how to do it right the first time through.