[bdw5204]

"Quality code", in my experience, often means "code that looks like how I would have done it". In other words, it's usually pointless nitpicking and you're better off not engaging in it. Of course, there's some convergence on this topic because certain programming influencers successfully pushed their opinions onto many people who choose not to have opinions of their own which is something that happens in every field because many people find actual independent thought hard or scary.

There are some things that genuinely matter such as minimizing repetition, using variable names that are clear/easily searchable with "find" (meaning without tons of false positives) and not writing undebuggable code if you can avoid it[0]. I also think performance matters even if it seems fast enough on your machine. In my view, you shouldn't use Integer instead of int in Java unless you absolutely have to because Integer wastes resources creating an object containing an int and dramatically increases cache misses[1]. But in general, it isn't worth worrying about unless you can actually come up with a coherent explanation of why your preferred way of writing code will make the software perform better or be easier to maintain. Of course, the only absolute rule in code is that there's always an exception to every rule.

[0]: I'm generally in the "C/C++ macros considered harmful" camp especially when they resemble functions and feel similarly about anything else that makes the code execution path less than straightforward to follow.

[1]: I have a strong suspicion that OOP itself is an anti-pattern and that the entire paradigm is a wrong turn that needs to be abandoned. It's weird because I had a favorable opinion of OOP before I learned what it is in college but it tripped my brain's BS alarm. But I've never worked in a large enterprise environment so I haven't actually seen it in practice enough to fairly evaluate it.

[hinkley]

I'd like to see us start measuring the quality of libraries by how difficult it is to trace through them from client code.

I've worked with a few too many instances of code golf where the resulting code requires too many brain cells to comprehend. If I wanted to dedicate 5% of my attention to 50 different libraries, I'd need 3 more brains to do it, but most libraries are written that way. Some seem to think they're entitled to 10%. More.

Show me a library that's a snoozefest to figure out why I put it 5 and got out false when I expected true. That's the one I want to use.

[zeroonetwothree]

Ironically I don’t really agree with your list of things that “genuinely matter”. I would pick entirely different things.