First off, I love beautiful code and have been known to fixate on it so this article is a formalization of what I think to myself every time I start to get religious over coding quality.

Code quality is an oft talked about yet poorly defined topic amongst programmers. Ask 100 different developers what "quality" means to them and you'll receive 100 different answers. Responses will range from "Quality code is code that can be easily changed and understood" to "Quality code is hard to define but following the SOLID principles is a good start" to "it's more of an art that's hard to define." Ok, but maybe you're thinking that these are too abstract and should refer to reducing costs and reducing bugs. Sure. Maybe. Ultimately, however, all of these definitions of "quality" skirt the elephant in the room.

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