First let me say that the views expressed by Michael Ash are almost identical to mine. However, I have to take issue with the often quoted statement of Kernighan on debugging.

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by
definition, not smart enough to debug it." -- Brian W. Kernighan

Kernighan takes a general assertion on debugging and concludes that it can be applied to any specific example. That is simply not valid whatever his meaning of 'hard' or 'cleverly as possible'.

Even a general conclusion is not valid unless by 'clever' he means intentionally obtuse.

I would consider clever coding to be using one's imagination to write code that accomplishes its purpose
in perhaps non obvious ways. It could even be easier to debug!

Code which I consider 'clever' that I wrote on an IBM mainframe in assembler was designed to make and did make debugging production programs considerably easier.

Bill
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