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Random Thoughts on Leadership & Technology

Aesthetics and Good Taste in Software Engineering

aesthetics

Code A

def process(items):
    result = []
    for i in range(len(items)):
        if items[i] is not None:
            if items[i] >= 0:
                result.append(items[i] * 2)
    return result

Code B

def process(items):
    return [item * 2 for item in items if item is not None and item >= 0]

Do you know why one of these feels more elegant than the other? Most engineers do - instinctively. Even before thinking about performance or correctness, something clicks. That instinct is aesthetics. And it matters more than we usually admit.

Aesthetics and Good Taste in Software Engineering

Software engineering is often framed as a purely technical discipline - algorithms, data structures, correctness, performance. But anyone who has spent time reading real-world code knows that this framing is incomplete.

Code is also experienced. It is read, interpreted, extended, reviewed, and judged (yes, even in the age of AI) - by humans.

This idea is not new. From the earliest days of computing, the people who shaped the field understood that programming was as much about expression as execution.

Elegance Is Not Decoration

When people hear aesthetics, they often think of superficial concerns - formatting debates, naming preferences, or personal style wars. But aesthetics in software engineering is not about decoration.

It’s about fit.

Edsger W. Dijkstra famously argued that programming is an exercise in human thought, not machine instruction. In Notes on Structured Programming, he warned against cleverness that obscures reasoning, insisting that clarity of structure is what enables correctness.

Elegant code

Donald Knuth captured this sentiment in The Art of Computer Programming when he emphasized that programs should be written "for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute."

In the opening example, both snippets do the same thing. But the second compresses the idea into a single, readable expression. There’s no bookkeeping, no index juggling, no incidental complexity.

The structure mirrors the intent.

Filter valid items, then transform them.

That alignment is aesthetic - and deeply practical.

Good Taste Is a Compression Algorithm

Good taste in software engineering is the ability to compress complexity without losing meaning.

This idea echoes through the history of the field. Dijkstra advocated for minimizing "mental effort". Niklaus Wirth summarized an entire philosophy with "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs" Tony Hoare emphasized that simplicity is a prerequisite for reliability.

Engineers with good taste

Taste feels subjective, but it converges over time. Engineers separated by decades independently rediscover the same principles because maintenance punishes bad taste relentlessly.

Code Is Read More Than It Is Written

This cliché survives because it’s true. Most of a codebase’s lifetime is spent being read

Fred Brooks, in The Mythical Man-Month, observed that conceptual integrity is the most important property of a system. That integrity is not enforced by compilers - it is perceived by readers. Aesthetic code optimizes for the reader. It anticipates confusion and removes it preemptively. This is not indulgence. It is empathy encoded into structure. Languages like Lisp, Smalltalk, and later Python explicitly embraced readability as a core value. Python’s Zen states plainly:

“Readability counts.”

That is an aesthetic claim - and a practical one.

Aesthetics Enable Correctness

There’s a quiet truth many engineers learn the hard way:

Ugly code hides bugs.

Dijkstra again warned that testing can show the presence of bugs, but never their absence. Clarity, not testing alone, is what enables reasoning.

When logic is tangled, responsibilities blur, and structure doesn’t match intention, errors slip through unnoticed. Aesthetic clarity acts as a correctness amplifier.

This insight drove the development of:

These movements were not about fashion. They were attempts to shape code so that mistakes become harder to express.

When code “looks right,” deviations stand out. When everything is messy, nothing looks suspicious.

Taste as a Professional Responsibility

Good taste is not optional, elitist, or academic. It is part of the job.

Christopher Alexander, whose work deeply influenced software design patterns, argued that good structures have a "quality without a name" - a sense of rightness that emerges from coherence and simplicity.

The Gang of Four patterns were not meant to be recipes. They were shared vocabulary for expressing taste - ways of recognizing structures that work well over time.

Writing code that others can understand, trust, and extend is a professional—l - and ethical - responsibility in collaborative systems.

Dismissing aesthetics as "subjective" is like dismissing clarity in writing because prose is personal. Yes, taste involves judgment. But it is still a craft.

And like all craft:

By reading great code. By studying classic systems. By rewriting your own.

The Quiet Payoff

The payoff of aesthetic software engineering is subtle but profound:

Unix, TeX, Git, SQLite - these systems endure not because they are trendy, but because they are tasteful. Their internal structure reflects restraint, clarity, and respect for the reader.

In the end, aesthetics in software is not about beauty for its own sake. It is about respect - for the problem, for the reader, and for the future.

And once you start seeing it, you can’t unsee it.

You'll look at two pieces of code that do the same thing and think:

One of these understands what it is trying to say.