I find code that does more with less to be beautiful and valuable. Note that I'm not including code that does the same with less. As with all things beautiful,

I find code that does more with less to be beautiful and valuable. Note that I'm not including code that does the same with less. As with all things beautiful, this is tough to illustrate, so I'll use an analogy here from Physics. Page "xv" of the book "A course in mathematics for students of physics" (volume 2) by Paul Bamberg and Shlomo Sternberg contains a table (do a "look inside" on Amazon) that shows four forms of Maxwell's equations as they evolved over the course of history. Each change expresses what the previous one did, but contributes something more that wasn't possible or was very difficult to express with the earlier form. The first form explicitly uses cartesian coordinates. The second form is the vector notation, which helps conceptualize and work with the equations in any coordinate system appropriate to the problem (circular, cylindrical, etc.). The third is the relativistic "four-vector" formulation, which, though it says the same thing as the vector form, allows extension to curved spacetime. The fourth exterior calculus formulation (which just reads "dF = 0, and 𝛿F = J"!) covers all of the preceding ones, and also takes exactly the same form when applied to circuits (the kirchoff laws, etc.) which is not something you can say for the preceding forms, while allowing generalization to higher dimensions. The mathematical machinery invented for that simple looking expression is incredibly beautiful (and that book does a great job of its exposition, imo). This kind of beauty in software is very desirable in my opinion and we do have examples like MapReduce to show for it. Yes the machinery to do a distributed MapReduce is complex, but the concept is simple and flexible and has a bit of the "exterior calculus" fragrance to it. Another is continuations in Scheme - which not only can replace any "mundane" control transfer (break, continue, throw, catch, and ilk) but can do much more than just those and lets you roll your own too. I believe that is the kind of beauty we should be striving for in software, not just the "pretty code" kind. (minor edits)