If you are just writing for yourself, and you don't need tests, etc. then who cares what you do. Follow your bliss and more power to you. But if there is some chance I will have to fix or figure out your code - please DO try to make it maintainable. Useful code is useful even if it's dirty, but it's just polite to consider your audience. Surely this is not controversial?<p>Maybe the issue here is some disagreement about what "maintainable" means and in particular, in how and where it conflicts with "clever."<p>If "clever" means intentionally obfuscated, or doing something in a complex or unorthodox way just to show off, I don't think there is much controversy that this is unhelpful and not good unless you are just pleasing yourself. If "clever" means extreme conciseness beyond the point where it makes it very hard to read and understand, I would tend to look at that as more of the same.<p>Cleverness is often instituted to make code more maintainable, as in many cases of "Don't Repeat Yourself" using introspection. I tend to think that gratuitously huge amounts of mandatory boilerplate are very not-clever and actually decrease maintainability.<p>For example, I have seen dependency injection being heavily touted for 'maintainability', but making a religion out of this can lead to all kinds of tortured and unclear code (just like what you see from many people who have recently become infatuated with "patterns"). Code which is overly complex for the task, and hard to read, isn't that maintainable in my book.<p>Cleverness can also be done behind the scenes of an API, hidden behind a screen, to make life easier for the API's end users. Sometimes this is good, sometimes bad. Often it is worthwhile to get a clean implementation, just hard to do.<p>I don't think there is any clear definition of "code monkey" but I think such derogatory terms should be reserved for people who are really incompetent all around, not just people who do clean workmanlike jobs and worry about how their code reads and extends and so on. Those are good things to worry about; there are other things to worry about, but those are good things to worry about.