Personally I don’t care about beautiful code or “good programmers”. I care about making something helpful and useful, maintaining it over time, taking users’ fe

Personally I don’t care about beautiful code or “good programmers”. I care about making something helpful and useful, maintaining it over time, taking users’ feedback to make it better. Writing fancy looking code is so much easier than all that stuff, it’s academic really. I can't tell you how much I would rather write a bunch of code than conduct user research, or read the feedback to see where we need to improve. Because coding is so much easier than doing those things. But doing those things is more valuable, because the value is in the artifact, the thing that the code is in service of. Beauty, or any other value, in the actual code itself is inert, it's dead. It has no worth unless it solves a problem for someone, or is instructive for a coder who's learning how to solve a problem for someone. The exception to what I'm saying is that the code must be legible, people need to read it and understand what it does. But that is not beauty; beauty is an aesthetic proposition, legibility is a utilitarian proposition. Longer, more verbose code is better than "elegant" concise code, if the longer code is easier to understand.