[ralphstodomingo]

> Using "clever" as a criticism is implicitly an ad personam argument, passing value judgement on the person who wrote it ("Oh, they must have written it to show off") instead of an argument about the code itself.

I don't know how you got this conclusion.

I can see judgement being passed to the code with respect to not just who wrote it, but also who's going to need to understand it later, who's going to need to make changes to it. In that sense, calling code "too clever" makes sense, right?

There's hyper-specific reasons why you'd need code that's going to be complex/too clever for that group, esp if it saves cost or is faster than the simpler alternatives, but in most cases there's nothing that justifies it.