Chapter 7

Beauty and mechanical sympathy

Beauty is a property of the mental model an artifact induces, not of the artifact, which is why the program matters more than the source code and why an obsession with the medium – text – is a narrowing. Simplicity is beautiful not because it compresses well but because it composes well, is easily maintained, and delivers the promises the software set out to keep. Formatting, naming and style guides are not dismissed; their value is collaborative, homogenising software so that many developers, future self included, can work in it over time. The mental model comes from running the artifact, debugging it, interacting with it and reading its documentation as much as from reading its source. Software is interpreted by machines too, and there it has real meaning, so the designs worth admiring satisfy both sides at once. Unix is the worked example: beautifully composable from the human side, while text pipes tax the machine with constant encoding and decoding and many small programs tax it with spawning – a tension that structured pipes and single-binary shells resolve, their drawbacks being about legacy compatibility rather than design.