> 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.
