What is beautiful code?

Top Commentators

No comments this month

Search

Subscribe to our feed:

About

The JAOO Community Blog is a blog for everyone interested in software development and for all participants in the JAOO-conferences.

The blog will be dominated by the topics and questions raised at the JAOO conference in Aarhus, Brisbane and Sydney, the QCON conference in London and San Francisco and the Ruby conference in Copenhagen and Oslo.

All comments are greatly appreciated

JAOOtalk on Twitter

@EyeQueAreAyy94 So jaoo May 20, 2013 XtreemKhan (Xtreemkhan)
@shutar_murg so jaoo beeee May 20, 2013 sakbtw (SAK)
@KryanianForever @karantacker It would be a great experience ! MAAN bhi jaoo <333 May 20, 2013 ktlovers (Alina Kiran tacker)
@azra_sehic we just ate earlier jaoo May 20, 2013 Mehaga69 (Big Hamid)
Jagny waly So jaoo...Sony Waly jag jao...:p May 20, 2013 Darudesii (ƧhȜįkh Dânį♥)

The JAOO show on blip.tv

« Being a crew member at JAOO | Main | Why do I keep coming back as a speaker at JAOO Aarhus? »

By Therese Hansen | July 2, 2008

First of all: What is beauty?

For beauty includes three conditions, “integrity” or “perfection,” since those things which are impaired are by the very fact ugly; due “proportion” or “harmony”; and lastly, “brightness” or “clarity,” whence things are called beautiful which have a bright color.

— Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica.

This definition of beauty by Thomas Aquinas was at the center of a talk at JAOO Aarhus, 2007. The speaker Marcel Molina took this classical definition and applied it to code.

Integrity: Integrity is about fitness for purpose – how well does the solution fit the problem?
Proportionality: Good structure with perfect relation between parts of a system.
Clarity: Simplicity and clarity of code.

After the talk Kresten Krab did an interview with Marcel Molina, Glenn Vanderburg and Chad Fowler about the beauty of code and they concluded that it is something worth striving towards. Not because you want to be an artist but because it is good for your clients.

You can see the interview here:

The idea is that making beautiful code has practical value and is not just an egotistical desire on the part of the programmer who wants to be an artist. Beauty is used as an indicator of quality. Even when the beauty is in the source code and not visible to the customer of a software product it is still desirable in terms of the trade-off between cost of creation and cost of ownership.

Kent Beck talks about common code smells and the smell of ugly code can be very useful, but can the notion of beauty be of practical use as well?

Can we build on the thinking of Marcel Molina and Thomas Aquinas and get nice practical rules of thumb about beautiful code?