"In a way good programmers make it more difficult for younger programmers to notice these things, since an elegant design might reflect innumerable man-hours of

"In a way good programmers make it more difficult for younger programmers to notice these things, since an elegant design might reflect innumerable man-hours of careful decision making and improvement but it works so well and so smoothly and with so few parts that it can seem almost trivial." "[W]hen we see code that doesn't have a big clanking WTF in the middle of it, when we see code that seems to make intuitive sense, we don't tend to ponder the optimization and tradeoffs that went into it. But in truth those can be just as deep and just as profound for ordinary looking code as for obviously clever stuff. That goes double when you only use the software." Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. I want to write more, but in those two quotes you've managed to articulate something that I've been thinking about quite a bit recently. Good software doesn't seem good. It is invisible.