Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity. A language that makes it hard to write elegant code makes it hard to write good code.
Interpretation
The quality of code is influenced by its complexity and beauty, affecting its reliability.
Eric S. Raymond emphasizes that aesthetically pleasing code often correlates with lower complexity and higher reliability. When programs are well-structured and elegant, they are easier for engineers to understand and maintain, reducing the likelihood of errors and failures, akin to how attractive bridges are perceived as more structurally sound.
In practice
In a tech conference discussing software development best practices.
Rushing to optimize before the bottlenecks are known may be the only error to have ruined more designs than feature creep. From tortured code to incomprehensible data layouts, the results of obsessing about speed or memory or disk usage at the expense of transparency and simplicity are everywhere. They spawn innumerable bugs and cost millions of man-hours - often, just to get marginal gains in the use of some resource much less expensive than debugging time
Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow (e.g., given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone).
Software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry
It is the triumph of civilization that at last communities have obtained such a mastery over natural laws that they drive and control them. The winds, the water, electricity, all aliens that in their wild form were dangerous, are now controlled by human will, and are made useful servants.
Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.
The main effect of the Internet on language has been to increase the expressive richness of language, providing the language with a new set of communicative dimensions that haven't existed in the past.
Part of the problem is when we bring in a new technology we expect it to be perfect in a way that we don't expect the world that we're familiar with to be perfect.
In the face of technology, everything becomes a little atavistic.
The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.
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