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
For the last 10 years, I've felt increasing pressure to stop shooting film and start shooting video, but I've never understood why. It's cheaper to work on film, it's far better looking, it's the technology that's been known and understood for a hundred years, and it's extremely reliable.
Stationary storage will be as big as the car business long term. The growth rate will probably be several times what it is for the car business.
Technology... the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.
We are not even close to finishing the basic dream of what the PC can be.
The rate of human invention is faster, and the rate of cultural loss is slower, in areas occupied by many competing societies with many individuals and in contact with societies elsewhere.
Surveillance technologies now available - including the monitoring of virtually all digital information - have advanced to the point where much of the essential apparatus of a police state is already in place.
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