February 2010
Beginner
255 pages
6h 10m
English
Content preview from 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
Start your free trial
Chapter 5. Beauty Is in Simplicity
THERE IS ONE QUOTE, from Plato, that I think is particularly good for all software developers to know and keep close to their hearts:
Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depends on simplicity.
In one sentence, this sums up the values that we as software developers should aspire to.
There are a number of things we strive for in our code:
Readability
Maintainability
Speed of development
The elusive quality of beauty
Plato is telling us that the enabling factor for all of these qualities is simplicity.
What is beautiful code? This is potentially a very subjective question. Perception of beauty depends heavily on individual background, just as much of our perception of anything depends on our background. People educated in the arts have a different perception of (or at least approach to) beauty than people educated in the sciences. Arts majors tend to approach beauty in software by comparing software to works of art, while science majors tend to talk about symmetry and the golden ratio, trying to reduce things to formulae. In my experience, simplicity is the foundation of most of the arguments from both sides.
Think about source code that you have studied. If you haven’t spent time studying other people’s code, stop reading this right now and find some open source code to study. Seriously! I mean it! Go search the Web for some code ...