| Elegance in design is a difficult concept to appreciate until you’ve actually worked with both elegant and inelegant designs. An inelegant design has a pile of features thrown together in a chaotic mess; an elegant design establishes an overarching conceptual structure that allows all the features to fit together naturally. Elegant designs are easier to use because, once you learn the overarching principles, you can apply those principles to features you’ve never used before, and those features will work exactly as you expect. Each feature in an inelegant design has its own custom way of operating, and so must be learned individually. —Chris Crawford, The Sixes and the Eights |
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Elegance is a widely desired, if elusive, quality in computer systems.