A smart dev is someone that learns new paradigms and concepts and the applies them only where they make things easier to understand/maintain.
It's not enough to learn about higher kinded types, you've got to know when forcing them into a place is a bad idea.
I've seen a bunch of devs that can't help but write unmaintainable code because they learn a new programming concept and decide to shoehorn it in everywhere. This happens even with basic concepts like generics.
The same thing happens to devs that aren't curious. If they never learn newer programming concepts then every problem looks like a nail and inheritance is the hammer. Those systems equally become unmaintainable because clearer programming paradigms would make the code more readable and maintainable.
Contrast that with walking into a codebase in a statically typed language that uses String as the predominant type with little to no effort spent on sanitizing the data in those Strings.
It’s understandable in pieces… but also really hard to scale/refactor/replace after it has grown enough.
I think I covered that case in the end of my comment.
> The same thing happens to devs that aren't curious. If they never learn newer programming concepts then every problem looks like a nail and inheritance is the hammer.
Stringly types or the overuse of Dictionary/maps in a statically typed language are extensions of this concept.
> A smart dev is someone that learns new paradigms and concepts and the applies them only where they make things easier to understand/maintain.
I think we put a little to much stock in "smart" developers. What you describe sounds more like a "wise" developer - as in "a clever developer knows how to map-reduce, a wise developer knows not to put it in a fruit salad"...
IMO, there's no difference. There are few concepts in programming that are really unknowable or ungraspable. Anyone that can program can misunderstand and misuse programming concepts.
The only wisdom is asking "should I"? And that, to me, is being smart and cleaver. Cleaver people don't write hard to understand/maintain code. Cleaver people write code that anyone can come to and understand. They write elegant code.
It's not enough to learn about higher kinded types, you've got to know when forcing them into a place is a bad idea.
I've seen a bunch of devs that can't help but write unmaintainable code because they learn a new programming concept and decide to shoehorn it in everywhere. This happens even with basic concepts like generics.
The same thing happens to devs that aren't curious. If they never learn newer programming concepts then every problem looks like a nail and inheritance is the hammer. Those systems equally become unmaintainable because clearer programming paradigms would make the code more readable and maintainable.