Is There Room For Beauty In A Vibe-Coded Future?
Beautiful Code was published nearly 20 years ago in 2007. The blurb on the back cover promises an over-the-shoulder look of leading developers creating elegant solutions to hard problems. Some of those shoulders belong to well-known heavyweights of an earlier period, including Brian Kernighan and Jon Bentley . A bit closer to the present, Yukihiro Matsumoto, nicknamed Matz and inventor of Ruby, writes "Treating Code As An Essay." Notably, Matz argues that code is meant to be read by humans. Ideally, beautiful code would be simple, balanced, and make developers happy and productive. In contrast, I must point out, AI generated code is meant to be, at most, corrected. Separately, Bjarne Stroustrup had this to say when asked by Lex Friedman on how can you tell when your code has reached the Einstein level of simplicity : "It's easier to recognize ugly than to recognize beauty in code. . . sometimes beauty comes from something that is innovative and unusual,...