[aequitas]

Unless your building a user facing frontend please keep art out of your code. Just like a bridge internal's concrete structure doesn't need decoration so does your backend's plumbing. Writing elegant and artful code that is hard to understand and debug does not make you a clever developer. Keep that stuff for the demo-scene or 99-bottles-of-beer. Go is an language for engineering software, not crafting.

[gtf21]

This seems to have totally missed the first half of the comment to which you replied: _elegance_ certainly has a place in programming, just as it does in mathematics and many other disciplines. Things that are elegant are often difficult to conceive, but easy to understand being simpler solutions to a problem than something inelegant.

[rat9988]

I have seen uncharitable interpretations, but this one is one one of the worst.

[fastball]

What exactly are you picturing when someone says "elegant" or "artful" code?

To me, elegant code is DRY code. Elegant code is code with useful abstractions where needed, and no abstractions where they just complicate matters. Code that is succinct yet clearly communicates its purpose.

From the sounds of it, you have an entirely different conception of what elegant code looks like.

[crazyjncsu]

> Writing elegant and artful code that is hard to understand and debug does not make you a clever developer

The whole purpose, to me, of artfulness in code is to take unartful, hard to understand code and make it simple. What other objective is there?

[bjornjajajaja]

Honestly if a solution is too hard to understand and debug then it is not elegant. Elegance is turning a complicated solution into an easier-understood one. Clever solutions could be elegant but they could also be shortcuts that are confusing and cause more harm than good. There’s definitely a difference.

[Koshkin]

> Unless your building a user facing frontend please keep art out of your code.

Honestly, I had rather art be kept out of the user facing frontend. (Computer programming, on the other hand, is considered art by some computer scientists.)

[tpmx]

(I don't necessarily disagree, but...)

It's probably changed a lot since, but at least back in the 90s demo-scene code was absolutely 100% written for the result alone, even perhaps when it should perhaps have been say 75% for the sake of reusability. Imagine "decent" 90s game code quality, then dial the qualitynotch down a bit, since it will only have to work once on a well-defined machine anway.

I'm long since tuned-out. I do seem to remember Farbrausch making some waves when they started applying the concept of reusability and structure to their work in the early 2000s.

[njharman]

> Writing elegant and artful code that is hard to understand

You do not know the meaning of elegant. At least in context of programming and maths.

[skywhopper]

You have a depressingly narrow view of what "art" can mean.