SD West 2008 Underway; Beautiful Code First Up

SD West 2008 is underway for me this evening. Actually, if I had gotten up earlier this morning, it might have been underway for me a lot sooner. However, sleeping-in made it possible for me to save up all my energy for this evening's panel discussion on "Beautiful Code." Not that I needed a lot of energy -- the panel participants did all the heavy lifting for me, which means that I didn't have to do a whole lot once I had them introduce themselves.

Based on the book of the same name, Beautiful Code the panel was made up of six of the 33 contributors to the book. More specifically, the stars of the panel were Michael Feathers, Jim Kent, Christopher Seiwald, Elliotte Harold, Ron Mak, and Alberto Savoia. I hung around to keep the conversations going (which wasn't hard) and make sure the panel had plenty of bottled water.

Alberto Savoia made an important point early on when he said that it is easier to define ugly code -- "everyone knows what that is" -- than it is to define beautiful code. Proving him correct, the six panel members came up with six different definitions of beautiful code, ranging from "code that works" to "code without comments but that you can read." As for ugly code, that's easy to define -- it's "someone else's code."

In response to an audience question wondering if code has to work to be considered "beautiful", Elliotte Harold pointed to the title of his chapter -- "Correct, Beautiful, Fast (in That Order)" -- which summed up his definition of beautiful code. So yes, it should work. Ron Mak concurred, using as an example his chapter entitled "A Highly Reliable Enterprise System for NASA's Mars Rover Mission" in which the software absolutely had to work correctly.

One thing panelists did agree on was that beautiful code has nothing to do with the programming language at hand, something that was reflected in Beautiful Code the book which included examples based on Fortran, Lisp, C, Java, and Python, among other languages.

So what's the bottom line? What is beautiful code? According to Dr. Dobb's contributing editor Greg Wilson (who unfortuantely wasn't in attendance) and, who along with O'Reilly's Andy Orem edited the book, "we know what's beautiful code. Everyone had a different view on it which was a more interesting result than anything definitive."

Posted by Jon Erickson at 12:51 AM  Permalink