[klibertp]

> Code is never 'beautiful'. It's either concise, well-written and formatted well, or it isn't.

This is not true. You may not value beauty as a characteristic of code, but there are people who do.

Also, you could say the same thing about novels. "concise, well-written and formatted well" are features of most published novels; does it mean they all are the same in terms of beauty?

Beauty is inherently subjective and relative. Personally, I find the code which form and function fit together pretty. It's the same kind of beauty I feel when reading poems. You're free to ignore such things, of course, but saying that the code can never be pretty is actually quite a bit rude to some people.

[V-2]

In my opinion it depends on the type of code. It's unlikely to find beauty in a run-of-the-mill CRUD app; it can be nice and neat at best. Beautiful code is possible when there's creativity involved - there should be some conceptual originality to the code in question. Of course it's not physically impossible to bury some brilliancy in a bank transaction processing script, it's just a less probable place to find one.