Type initializer circular dependencies - Jon Skeet: Coding Blog:

I have to say, part of me really doesn't like either the testing code or the workaround. Both smack of being clever, which is never a good thing.

I surfed around Jon Skeet's Stackoverflow profile and ran into his blog, which I've got to say is really good.  Especially enjoyed this recent comment on being clever.  I enjoy being clever when the result is easy to understand and rock-solid, even when there's perhaps a bit of clever recursion used (which tends to degrade both the "rock-solidness" and easy understanding, admittedly), but here he's bang on -- too many developers we've all worked with like to do things that work for a particular piece of code, but the scalability (or even ability to undergo plain ole change) of the solution is almost nil.  Code that's a cleverly constructed house of cards (Skeet uses "brittle") isn't good construction at all.

And if there's one thing I've learned, it's that programmers are 21st century construction workers.  (So too are actual construction workers, to be clear.  It's simply that there's a new sort of construction.)

In other news, Skeet accepted a very minor edit I made to one of his answers (re-inserting a link using archive.org to a site that'd disappeared, but was still obliquely mentioned, in his post).  Yes, that's a reputation score of 66 to his 428,000+.  Brush with greatness.  ;^D

I'll now stop talking about Skeet, but his coding knowledge is impressive.