[hosh]

I think the line of thinking you want to explore has more to do with how we perceive beauty and elegance. That has been the subject of philosophers all over in our recorded history, and I doubt a single article will be able to cover this.

Christopher Alexander studied this deeply for building architecture, and his ideas had influenced many thinkers of software architecture; Alexander asserts that there is a thing to objective beauty. Alexander’s keynote to the OOPSLA conference is worth reading, as is Roy Fielding’s dissertation. The “values” mentioned in this article is organized as “architectural properties” in Fielding’s dissertation.