Basildon Coder

In his review of Code Is Beautiful, Jeff Atwood decides that no, actually it isn’t. He’s fairly adamant about it too:

Ideas are beautiful. Algorithms are beautiful. Well executed ideas and algorithms are even more beautiful. But the code itself is not beautiful. The beauty of code lies in the architecture, the ideas, the grander algorithms and strategies that code represents.

I just can’t agree with this. It’s effectively saying that a representation cannot be beautiful; only the underlying thing that’s being represented can be beautiful. Worse, this argument is extended to literature and art as well, and quotes a reader review from Amazon that quotes a little Russian poetry and rhetorically asks whether any non-Russian-speaking reader can see beauty in it.

This drives me nuts, it really does. Of course the representation can be beautiful, and it can also be ugly. And the beauty of the representation can have an amplifying effect on the subject of the representation. Form and content are related. A non-Russian-speaker may not appreciate Russian poetry, but that doesn’t mean that form itself has no value - it means that, in this case at least, the value of form is dependent on the content. If you don’t understand the content, you don’t appreciate the form.

This isn’t an absolute, though. In literature, there are many techniques for adding value to form. Alliteration, assonance, metre, and many more techniques are all structural techniques for beautifying form. I’d argue that pretty much anyone can appreciate the compact and succinct beauty of the phrase veni, vidi, vici without understanding what it means (”I came, I saw, I conquered”).

There are countless other examples. You don’t need to understand Italian to enjoy opera, for instance. In fact, I’ve even heard it argued that understanding the content of an opera can diminish the experience, since the actual meaning is often fairly bland and distracts from the simple appreciation of the complex sounds and interplay of the language in the hands (or lungs) of a world-class performer.

So what’s the equivalent in software? I think expressiveness and elegance are key. In particular, code that is able to express ideas without adding a lot of noise. I’m very partial to Haskell for this sort of thing - for instance the canonical quicksort implementation is wonderfully precise:

quicksort []        = []
quicksort (x:xs)    = quicksort less ++ [x] ++ quicksort greater
    where less      = [ y | y <- xs, y < x ]
          greater   = [ y | y <- xs, y >= x ]

If you know the quicksort algorithm, then the 2nd line of code there is about as precise an expression of the underlying concept as you could hope for. If you write the same algorithm in C or Visual Basic, I believe that you can objectively distinguish the ‘beauty’ of these representations of the same underlying concept. This is only possible if the representations do indeed have the quality of beauty.

Another, perhaps even better, example is the naive-recursive Fibonacci generator in the same language, which is remarkably close to the mathematical definition:

(from literateprograms.org)

fib n
    | n == 0    = 0
    | n == 1    = 1
    | n > 1     = fib(n-1) + fib(n-2)

Note I haven’t read the actual book under review here, and I have no reason to doubt the assertions that the book doesn’t deliver. I do, however, take umbrage at the statement that code (or language) cannot be beautiful.