I like the point about the virtuoso violinist. That'll stick in my head whenever I look at obfuscated code :-)

On the other hand, it is hard to argue that obfuscation has damaged the popularity of C or Perl. Both languages are very widely used, and I doubt that the ability to write cryptic code has had any impact on that.

Mind you, I don't obfu, because of a personal war against "clever" code in my projects. But as long as an obfu-loving geek will write clean, legible code at work, I say let him play. If I ever decipher the obfuscation, I'll probably learn something about the language.

"All you need is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure."-- Mark Twain