Haha, great example—that's exactly what I want from my bash scripts too :). Just a simple list of commands.
Salman Rushdie style is reserved for libraries that make a massive impact. Learning abstractions like that is like learning a new part of the language so it has to really pay off. Rare but not impossible.
The Haskell lens[1] library is a great example. It's almost too clever for its own good and learning it is like learning a new programming language, but it is such an improvement for the entire codebase it's worth it. I use it widely at work and it pays for its own difficulty almost immediately. (It's also important that it can't achieve some of its core functionality without the "clever" things it does.)
The documentation could use a bit of work though :/.
I've always thought Haskell was later James Joyce clever :)
I'm not sure if it is really appropriate for any code to be more than Robert Frost clever, sometimes think that should be clever enough for anyone. But this is only a periodic opinion.
on edit: I guess that means I'm saying no language needs to be more clever than Python.
We don't talk about c-groups and compressed files with metadata, we talk about containers and images. We don't talk about individual machines running a number of highly specialized daemons with configuration files, cryptographic keys, and networks-in-networks, we talk about clusters and pods and gateways.
Notwithstanding that much of the code which has built up these sweeping generalizations is built of a tangle of red dogs, the abstractions are very high level and mean we rarely have to discuss infrastructure at a very low level.
Of course, there's a twist to that as well, that hearkens back to an earlier statement: the understanding have been limited to an extremely high level as well. The number of people who can troubleshoot a container cluster is small, and growing smaller. We've intentionally created cliff notes of "Salman Rushdie" novels and believe that's all the populace needs.
Not sure what level of clever Salman Rushdie is acceptable for?