"One mans clever is another mans blindingly obvious. "

I think that, when in hindsight, something looks really obvious, it was probably the right thing to do.

I don't think lambda's or anything that specific are clever.

Every tool has it's use.

Here's an example of 'bad clever' - writing an optimized 'find' function which may very well be a little faster than the lib 'find' - but which will have absolutely no impact on the software.

I find that 'performance' is one of those areas that tends to be way over-engineered right off the bat.

Because of the historical (and current) performance constraints of systems - we soft engs. have 'built in' impetus to want to make things perform better.

There are very, very few things I will allow myself to optimize from the get-go. Even now - I have to urge myself to not do this. Code for clarity, then do the tweaking where necessary, because it's nary impossible to tell where the real bottleneck will be.