> The dumb (or lazy or new) developer will not notice or care about the appearance of a potential cool solution. They'll just bang out whatever works.
The pragmatic programmer (aka the person I want to hire) would also not care about the appearance of a potential cool solution, because experience teaches us that clever solutions tend to increase complexity and cognitive load, increasing not only the bug count, but also maintenance costs.
Yes, by all means be clever where it's warranted (strange constraints, bottlenecks, etc), but please not in regular code!
The pragmatic programmer (aka the person I want to hire) would also not care about the appearance of a potential cool solution, because experience teaches us that clever solutions tend to increase complexity and cognitive load, increasing not only the bug count, but also maintenance costs.
Yes, by all means be clever where it's warranted (strange constraints, bottlenecks, etc), but please not in regular code!