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: 
The double-bang: !!something

I'm not gonna write what it does. Forget that you ever saw this syntax.
[Cucumber](http://cukes.info/) (or [RSpec Stories](http://times.usefulinc.com/2008/01/12-rspec-stories))

Quoted from the above RSpec Stories link:

> 
> Based around plain text descriptions
>  of application behaviour, it lets you
>  write integration tests with good
>  reuse and good diagnostic reporting.
> 
> 
> For example, here's a story I wrote to
>  check the login process.
> 
> 
> 
> ```
> Story: login as an existing user
>     As an unauthenticated user
>     I want to log in to Expectnation
>     So I can see my account details
> 
>     Scenario: login details are correct
>             Given an event provider
>             And my test@example.org account
>             When I log in with email test@example.org and password foofoo
>             Then I will be logged in
>             And I will be shown the account page
> 
> ```
> 
> The words such as "Given", "When" and
>  "Then" are cues to the story runner to
>  execute some code. Behind the story
>  sits a collection of steps. Here's a
>  couple of steps from this test:
> 
> 
> 
> ```
>   Given "my $email account" do |email|
>     @user = find_or_create_user_by_email({:email => email,
>       :password => 'foofoo',
>       :password_confirmation => 'foofoo'})
>   end
> 
>   When "I log in with email $email and password $password" do |email, password|
>     post '/user/account/authenticate',
>       :user => {:email => email, :password => password}
>   end
> 
> ```
> 
> Notice how a clever bit of string
>  matching allows you to pass parameters
>  from the story prose.
> 
> 
> With a small bit of bolting together, the prose stories are then run as code and the tests executed.
> 
> 
>