[timwiseman]

I think you may be reading this article far more harshly than I was. For one, I do not think the person sitting at "sorta works" is necessarily a 'clueless hillbilly'.

In fact, I suspect most serious developers travel up and down this pyramid all the time. Sometimes they are trying to push the state of the art forward, sometimes something that "sorta works" and ships ontime is just fine.

As for "beautiful code" being fault tolerant, it could be argued that any code which is not fault tolerant is not beautiful. I am not sure if that is right or now, but beauty tends to be somewhat subjective and that seems a valid interpretation.

[alberich]

I see tow problems with this.

First, the fact that "beautiful" is very subjective... what makes code beautiful? Is it the idea expressed, the syntax, the cleverness?

Second, the fact that this subjective property could imply that something is fault tolerant, without being clear of what you mean by fault tolerance. This being a very large research area requires one to be precise of what one is talking about, before saying that you solve the problem by writing "beautiful" code.