What's an example of Ruby code that's “too clever”? [closed]

Answer 1

The double-bang: !!something

I'm not gonna write what it does. Forget that you ever saw this syntax.

Answer 2

Take a look at the source of Markaby. Insanity.

Answer 3

Recently uncovered this monster:

def id
  unless defined?(@id)
    @id = if id = local_body.to_s[/(?:#\s*|@[[:punct:]]?)#{URL_REGEX}/,1]
            id.to_i
          end
  end
  @id
end

Not that I disagree with caching a calculation, it could just be far more clear.

Answer 4

class Tree
  def initialize*d;@d,=d;end
  def to_s;@l||@r?"<#{@d},<#{@l}>,<#{@r}>>":@d;end
  def total;(@d.is_a?(Numeric)?@d:0)+(@l?@l.total: 0)+(@r?@r.total: 0);end
  def insert d
    alias g instance_variable_get
    p=lambda{|s,o|d.to_s.send(o,@d.to_s)&&
      (g(s).nil??instance_variable_set(s,Tree.new(d)):g(s).insert(d))}
    @d?p[:@l,:<]||p[:@r,:>]:@d=d
  end
end

Answer 5

Many of the examples in this article would seem to qualify:

21 Ruby Tricks You Should Be Using In Your Own Code.

The title of the article was a bit of a giveaway, given that it reads "Should" instead of "Should Not". Code "should" be transparent. Code "should not" be tricky.

Answer 6

I'm not sure if this qualifies as "too clever," but I have seen code that made me wonder if the author was either a genius or an idiot. One developer seemed to have a rule that no method should have more than two lines of code. That pushed the call stack very deep and made debugging rather difficult. The upside is that his overall design was very abstract and even elegant from a distance.