O’Reilly just published Beautiful Code. I was invited to contribute, but I just could not go along with the premise. I disagree that beauty is a guiding principle of programming. Here is how I responded.

I am having trouble with this assignment. Telling an inspiring story about a beautiful design feels disingenuous. Yes, we all strive for beautiful code. But that is not what a talented young programmer needs to hear. I wish someone had instead warned me that programming is a desperate losing battle against the unconquerable complexity of code, and the treachery of requirements. Of course I wouldn’t have believed them. It seems that pragmatism and humility can only be learned the hard way. I don’t know how to explain this in a case study. War stories do not instruct, because in retrospect the mistakes seem obvious. It is hard to convey the extent of the minefield of mistakes laying in wait. In essay form, I might say something like this:

I can’t teach you how to design beautiful code, because I don’t know how myself. I may have managed to get a few things almost right, and I have seen others do some nice work, but to be honest these successes always came from trial and error. The first try was often a total mess. Truly beautiful designs typically evolve from dozens of attempts, as for example with languages and libraries. Telling you to build one and throw it away, or to study a dozen prior examples, is just to admit that there are no general principles or techniques of software design. I hope that someday we will discover such principles. But in the meantime software design is still a matter of wisdom, not knowledge, and is therefore largely unteachable.

A lesson I have learned the hard way is that we aren’t smart enough. Even the most brilliant programmers routinely make stupid mistakes. Not just typos, but basic design errors that back the code into a corner, and in retrospect should have been obvious. The human mind can not grasp the complexity of a moderately sized program, much less the monster systems we build today. This is a bitter pill to swallow, because programming attracts and rewards the intelligent, and its culture encourages intellectual arrogance. I find it immensely helpful to work on the assumption that I am too stupid to get things right. This leads me to conservatively use what has already been shown to work, to cautiously test out new ideas before committing to them, and above all to prize simplicity.

Another lesson I have learned is to distrust beauty. It seems that infatuation with a design inevitably leads to heartbreak, as overlooked ugly realities intrude. Love is blind, but computers aren’t. A long term relationship, maintaining a system for years, teaches one to appreciate more domestic virtues such as straightforwardness and conventionality. Beauty is an idealistic fantasy: what really matters is the quality of the never ending conversation between programmer and code, as each learns from and adapts to the other. Beauty is not a sufficient basis for a happy marriage.