> The opinion that a point-free style is "beautiful code" seems pretty esotheric to me. It feels to me like there's this weird disconnect between people who ta

> The opinion that a point-free style is "beautiful code" seems pretty esotheric to me. It feels to me like there's this weird disconnect between people who talk about beautiful code and those who don't. For me, the aesthetic criteria that would lead me to call a piece of code beautiful are things like clarity, ease of understanding and simplicity. Writing code in a certain way might even elucidate the structure of the problem for the reader. Now, concision is definitely something that matters to me aesthetically, but if it comes at the cost of clarity, it just isn't worth it. I would consider very concise but complex and inscrutable point free code to be ugly. It definitely is my opinion that much of the time point free code is beautiful by these criteria. It's also often the case that I find point free code ugly. The thing that makes it difficult is that whether code is readable is heavily subjective. It very much depends on the familiarity of the reader with the functions and combinators and constructs that are in use. And of course people differ on the level of fluency in the language and language constructs that should be expected of the reader.