I recently watched a documentary where Dijkstra says the opposite:

https://youtu.be/RCCigccBzIU?t=1125

"One of the things I discovered as early as the 1960s is that mathematical elegance is not a question of aesthetics, of taste or fashion, but something you can translate into a technical notion.

"The Concise Oxford Dictionary gives as one of the meanings of 'elegant' 'ingeniously simple and effective'.

"In practice a program is manageable if you make a truly elegant program, firstly because it is shorter than most alternatives and consists of discrete parts, each of which you can replace by an alternative implementation without influencing the rest of the program, but also, curiously, the most elegant programs are often the most efficient."