MaxKlokan:
Please pardon this disjoint response. I've been gnashing my gears looking for a clear way to make my points, but I can't seem to tie it all together. Rather than giving up, I'll just break out the major bullet points I was working on:
The aphorism "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" (most recently espoused by grinder) is particularly apropos. Keep in mind who your audience is. The computer, certainly, doesn't care a whit about how cool/clever/beautiful/readable the code is. Thus, your primary audience is (a) the maintainer, who is often (b) yourself, a year from now.
Too many people confuse 'clever' with 'beautiful'. While clever code has a certain attraction, it also requires good comments. These comments, however, are another thing to maintain. Also, having to study comments to decipher a 'cool/clever' technique in a production outage is a great way to foster contempt from your fellows, except whilst golfing.
Tension between 'beauty' and 'readability' fades with experience. When a programmer starts, 'beauty' often means fancy formatting and "cool/surprising" code. With enough experience you come to despise surprise. Later, beauty seems to become synonymous with clear and simple.
Readability doesn't require you to dumb-down your code and skip standard perl idiom. Just a little helpful formatting to show the structure (as shown by ferreira's example) will make things more beautiful/readable to many. Advanced programmers will read it with no difficulty, and the visual structure will help guide the less-advanced programmers to the appropriate perldoc pages to read first.
--roboticus
I'm not very happy with this node yet. Any suggestions for improvement would be extremely welcome.
Update: Fixed link. (Thanks for catching that, Joost!)
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