Question: I was having a discussion with some programmer friends who said that they see Ruby programmers (in particular) producing a lot of code that's "too clever". So I'm wondering what would that look like? I'm referring to the unnecessary use of an obscure language feature in a context in which something straightforward would have worked just as well or better. Know any good Ruby examples of this?

Answer: 
It depends. (I love "it depends" questions)

It depends on the knowledge of the writer and reader. I used to think the use of [Symbol#to\_proc in Rails](http://blog.hasmanythrough.com/2006/3/7/symbol-to-proc-shorthand) was unnecessarily arcane, for example, preferring

```
a.map { |e| e.downcase }

```

to

```
a.map(&:downcase)

```

Now I'm happy when I read it, although I still don't think to write it.

There are areas of libraries (Rails and others) where I have felt excessive and self-indulgent metaprogramming may have occurred but again the division between "too clever" and "really very clever indeed" is often paper-thin. DSLs are a good area: the ways in which "macros" are made available within classes (think of all that declarative goodness in things like ActiveRecord::Base or ActionController::Base) is very hard for a relative novice to understand and would probably seem like over-cleverness. It did to me. Now I find myself referencing the same code for guidance as I implement similar capabilities.
method\_missing can be abused and it's one of those things that may cause you to pull your hair out when you have to fix a bug 3 months after you've written code.