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.
Take a look at the source of Markaby. Insanity.