Part of writing great code that, as a hacker, one can be proud of, is to understand the purpose of the code. Otherwise, there's no way to tell whether the code

Part of writing great code that, as a hacker, one can be proud of, is to understand the purpose of the code. Otherwise, there's no way to tell whether the code is great. To a large extent, yes. At the same time, a piece of code can be elegant and beautiful in the same way that many mathematical proofs are elegant and beautiful, even though they don't do anything immediately useful.