Just so, generic code is replaced by its concrete instances, which are faster and (at first) easier to comprehend. Just so, extensible code gets extended and s

Just so, generic code is replaced by its concrete instances, which are faster and (at first) easier to comprehend. Just so, extensible code gets extended and shimmed and customized until under its own sheer weight it collapses, then replaced by a monolith that Just Works. aesthetics alone keep us from the hell Beware of comparing "beautiful" code to subsequent code that deals with 10x the complexity in requirements. Either it's beautiful because it's perfectly suited to the scale and complexity it was written for, in which case it's impossible to preserve that beauty in the later, more complex code, or it's "beautiful" because it has a bunch of premature abstractions built in that somebody fantasized would handle all future complexity, in which case the "beauty" was useless work that later programmers had to undo. When the supposed genericity and extensibility of a system doesn't survive the evolution of the system to meet subsequent requirements, my first suspicion is premature abstraction, not insufficiently tasteful programmers. Even worse, the effort to dismantle this "beauty" is often considerable. Architecture, defined as the set of decisions that are costly to change, needs to anticipate the drastically different needs of the future. You rarely find architecture within the code of a single system early in its development, because code at that stage should be easy to rewrite. Code seen as "beautiful" by its author often violates this rule, creating architecture where architecture shouldn't exist.