97 Things Every Programmer should know part 5

Beauty Is in Simplicity

by Jorn Olmheim

THERE IS ONE QUOTE, from Plato, that I think is particularly good for all software developers to know and keep close to their hearts:

⚡The 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 several things we strive for in our code:

• Readability

• Maintainability

• Speed of development

• The elusive quality of beauty

The bottom line is that beautiful code is simple. Each part is kept simple with simple responsibilities and simple relationships with the other parts of the system. This is the way we can keep our systems maintainable over time, with clean, simple, testable code, ensuring a high speed of development throughout the lifetime of the system.

Beauty is born of and found in simplicity.