Comment What is "elegant" code anyway? (Score 2, Interesting) 748
Is it:
1. Massively documented, heavily object oriented code with lots of reuse, designed for ease of enhancement and maintenance, etc?
2. Tight, fast-executing code which, while it may be difficult to figure out at first glance, is powerful, resource-sparing, and generally cool algorithmically? Of course it is well documented, designed carefully, etc.
3. Other standards of elegance?
There are jobs for which (1) is the definition, and others for which (2) is a good definition - although my own bias leans toward (2). Note that systems built with (1) as the definition tend to be resource inefficient, but in many applications, this doesn't matter. Are you writing code which glues together a bunch of legacy db's and other apps or are you coding an OS or filesystem? To borrow a phrase from architecture: form follows function.
1. Massively documented, heavily object oriented code with lots of reuse, designed for ease of enhancement and maintenance, etc?
2. Tight, fast-executing code which, while it may be difficult to figure out at first glance, is powerful, resource-sparing, and generally cool algorithmically? Of course it is well documented, designed carefully, etc.
3. Other standards of elegance?
There are jobs for which (1) is the definition, and others for which (2) is a good definition - although my own bias leans toward (2). Note that systems built with (1) as the definition tend to be resource inefficient, but in many applications, this doesn't matter. Are you writing code which glues together a bunch of legacy db's and other apps or are you coding an OS or filesystem? To borrow a phrase from architecture: form follows function.
