I’d say it is pretty easy to abuse a language feature, especially anything that degrades readability (ternary, coalescing operators)…

But that is, if it is abused… you can use these features without abuse.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by lazycoder: [blogged]: Can a language be abused? http://www.lazycoder.com/weblog/2009/12/02/can-a-language-be-abused/...

Take Scrabble. Playing a new word alongside an existing one to create multiple 2 letter words is a good way to rack up the points. Placing new words in a way that makes it much harder for another player to take advantage of a triple-word-score bonus is a great defensive move.

These sorts of moves, again, are seen as “dick moves” in social play, but are old hat to advanced players.

Writing software is not a game. Typically it is social, in the sense that you and others will need to at least be able to read and understand the code later, and mostly likely fix and maintain it.

In software, dick moves really are dick moves. Taking clever advantage of all a language has to offer is, indeed, clever, but easily veers in to the realm of being anti-social.