Great article from Peter Coffee on the dangers of clever coding.  Developers, take heed: unless you're Hemingway, there is no virtue in terseness (and even for him, things didn't work out all that grandly).  Of course, the C language notoriously provides the flexibility to out-clever oneself into crazy obscure bugs.  C++ is much better in this regard but still provides a fine set of tools for the determined developer to ensure the compiler can't do its job of helping to identify bugs before the code is executed.

The classic counter argument offered by some C/C++ developers is, "well, I need the flexibility such-and-such wacky syntax allows for." This argument is, of course, a fallacy.  There is no dial between flexibility and maintainability, where one must chose some setting between the two.  Rather, flexibility and maintainability are orthogonal concepts.  It's entirely possible to write software to satisfy any number of constraints, such as high performance requirements or limited memory conditions, while still ensuring that such code is maintainable and modular.

Thanks to Nick for the pointer.