How can you explain "beautiful code" to a non-programmer?

Posted by Daniel Vandersluis on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Daniel Vandersluis
Published on 2011-04-05T01:26:20Z Indexed on 2011/11/22 10:26 UTC
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aesthetics

When speaking with a non-programmer friend, I happened to mention the concept of "beautiful code" and she wanted to understand what that meant, but I was at a bit of a loss as to how to explain it to someone who would have no context whatsoever.

When all code looks like gibberish to someone anyways, how can you explain what makes one piece of code prettier than another? Analogies could be useful too.

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