Actually, what people say about code, and how you interpret what they say, depends a lot on what you know about the person in question. I know lots of programm

Actually, what people say about code, and how you interpret what they say, depends a lot on what you know about the person in question. I know lots of programmers who can list lots of precise reasons why they think a piece of code is "good" or "clean", but who still seem to lack "good instincts". Writing code isn't really about ticking boxes, it is about communicating ideas to other human beings. And in that sense, a lot of programmers are to code like some people on the autism spectrum are to social interaction. Lack of instinct pushes us to make up precise rules to try to make sense of things. Rules which do not always work because their application is highly context dependent. And when the rules break down and people still insist the rules are good, you get absurd situations. For instance is composability good? Well, it depends. On paper this might seem like a simple thing to answer. In a given context composability might mean you have to bolt together a lot of moving parts to get anything done. If 99% of the time you bolt the same parts together the same way, you shouldn't explicitly have to do that. Perhaps composability isn't as important as you think in that instance. Anyone remember early XML infrastructure in Java? You want to parse an XML file and instead you end up instantiating and plugging together what felt like an awful lot of moving parts you neither needed nor wanted to know about just to parse an XML file? Yes, composability can be good. But as in the XML example, people don't always understand when it ends up being crap. (Actually, you can have both composability and convenience, so I am not trying to construct a false dichotomy here, but the original XML infrastructure was so "socially awkward" that it didn't really offer much convenience) One may think this is mere nuance. One could also say that uttering a sentence and picking the facial expression and tone of voice to go with it is nuance, and that the words you utter are always what matters. We know this isn't so. What makes code good is hard to describe. So merely trying to express it more precisely isn't enough. Yes you can say "composability: good". But in a given context it can also mean the code becomes less useful for the purpose in the majority of contexts.