How Do You Define Elegant Code?

Aidan Cully's answer has some meaningful content: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/97912/how-do-... It's also pretty close to my answer, except I would say that he gets bogged down in visual complexity and I'm more interested in the more empirical concerns of information content. Assuming "good" style, a solution that is minimal, contains only essential complexity, and nothing more, is elegant.

Languages differ in their general elegance by virtue of their ability to separate essential complexity from accidental complexity. For instance, C is hobbled in the contest to create truly elegant code, because in its capacity as "portable assembler" you can't ever really ignore memory management, which is in the accidental complexity domain for the vast bulk of problems.

Agreed, there is a pretty good discussion over on the portland pattern repository that echoes your take: "Elegance" really just means "has a lot of nice properties". So, when someone claims 'elegance', you should stop them and ask for clarification on the precise properties or features they are examining.

source: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ArgumentByElegance

The thing I'd say about "elegant" is that elegance achieves some combination of desirable characteristics so well that it stands out as a noticeably better solution. If you can use three somewhat obscure lines to do what someone else take five readable pages to do, you're elegant even the code isn't that readable.

That said, since true elegance is kind of exceptional, it probably shouldn't be the criteria for acceptable code - "clear, readable and reasonably" is a better standard to have.

Yep, I've always thought that if my code from six months ago isn't crap, then I must have stopped learning.

Agree on the naming, though it always brings to mind Tim Bray's quote: "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things"

Not "as precisely as possible" but "as precisely as necessary".

For example, "i" is great name for a loop variable. It keeps it from distracting you and it saves space so you can see more of the variables whose names matter.

I will add that your first glance at the code should give you the same feeling that you get when you see a hot sports car or an Apple product[1] for the first time. Humans are attracted to visual appeal and code is no exception. Code that looks visually appealing is the code you are going to enjoy maintaining.

[1] I realize Apple's design is not everyone's taste, it's just an example.

Lots and lots of talk about 'good', very, very little talk about elegant. Not to mention the ridiculous remarks about XOR. I find more often than not that those who have never at lest dabbled their hands in assembler tend to miss a number of things that they might otherwise appreciate. Elegance is one of them. Until you code without, it is hard to see how well something is at a higher level. But that is just the rant of someone who has been at this since the 70's :)