> How do you measure beauty? You can't: "beauty" is subjective

Let me try: in classical dance, martial arts, or even skateboarding, advanced skills manifest as effortlessness: the movements comes naturally, they're not forced, things just flow.

If you compare a typical functional (recursive + pattern matching, but the point would stand even with a fold) factorial with an imperative one (for loop), the functional approach is more effortless, you have to be less explicit about what's going on. It's more eloquent.

However as you seem to imply, when we're programming, the focus should be on delivering something that works as expected; this particular kind of aesthetic is secondary at best.

Often I get the impression that beauty is defined as "how far is this from what the computer can actually do efficiently?"

> How do you measure beauty?

Using the beholder's eye, of course.

I never understood anyone who used such strong language like "beauty" when talking about something mundane like recursion. I suspect it's just in-group language like how a cult understands the meaning of their own words, while to outsiders it would appear nonsensical. I have seen other groups appropriate the word "beauty" too, like people who chronically overeat.

This is a painfully stemlord response. 'Aesthetic qualities cannot be objectively measured therefor they do not exist'. Christ. Its fine to pick a metric to evaluate one thing against another, its another to deny that there are other ways to value things.