Comment by mrob

While I agree with the point about improving skills, I think there's a distinction to be made between artistic code and engineering code. Linus Åkesson writes some exceptionally clever code, but it's artistic code. The cleverness is both essential to the artistic effect and unlikely to break anything important.

But I wouldn't want my OS written like that. In engineering code, the only benefit of cleverness is better performance, and the risk is unreliability. My previous computer was a lot slower and it already did everything I need, so I'm willing to sacrifice a lot of performance for reliability. Most software is written so wastefully that it's usually possible to make up for the lost performance without cleverness anyway.