While I agree with MacKinnon in principle, we must acknowledge that simplicity is a luxury enabled by the surplus of compute power. > There are domains where 'cleverness' isn't just a vanity project, but a hard requirement. Take the Fast Inverse Square Root from Quake III or modern Zero-copy networking in high-throughput systems like Kafka. If we prioritized 'simple and readable' code in those contexts, we would be leaving orders of magnitude of performance on the table.

Sometimes, 'clever' code is simply code that refuses to ignore the underlying reality of the hardware. The danger isn't cleverness itself, but unnecessary cleverness applied to problems where the bottleneck is human understanding rather than machine execution.