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 output phase of yaml.rb; that's why I co-authored [zaml.rb](http://65.74.177.129/hallettj/zaml/commits/master/lib). The standard yaml version does all sorts of metaprogramming (it was originally written by why-the-lucky-stiff, who I generally admire) but by replacing it with a straight forward hierarchical version that directly maps to the class tree we were able to eliminate several O(n^3) cases, resulting in a factor of ten speedup for cases of interest, fix several bugs, and do so in a fraction of the code.

Plus, even people who aren't ruby gurus can see what it does.
You shouldn't have to go from method to method to method to try to figure out what in the hell something is doing, for the sole purpose of not repeating a few lines of code. Being too focused on the LOC count and ultra-skinny methods might feel cool at the time but is time-consuming for someone else trying to debug or follow the code (and that someone may be you months later).