15.1. My Idea of Beautiful Code

My idea of beautiful code stems from my belief that the ultimate purpose of code is to work. In other words, code should accurately and efficiently perform the task that it was designed to complete, in such a way that there are no ambiguities as to how it will behave.

I find beauty in code that I can trust—code that I am confident will produce results that are correct and applicable to my problem. What I am defining here as my first criterion of beautiful code is code that I can use and reuse without any shred of doubt in the code's ability to deliver results. In other words, my primary concern is not what the code looks like, but what I can do with it.