“elegant” usually isn’t. It usually stems from a flash of insight into the general character of a problem – which is fun, and often useful – but rarely is it the case that slavishly following up on that insight will result in a final system that is any more “elegant”, or “clean” than just doing something simple that works. “elegance” generally incurs a cost in development time and system complexity that is not paid back.

Of course, I am as bad as anyone else at following this advice. I love elegance. I love seeing the structural pattern that can be used to solve not just this problem, but a whole class of problems similar to this one. But you have to keep that impulse under control. As often as not, you will learn something about the problem that makes it a worse fit for that general solution once you’ve solved the problem once in a simple fashion and looking at the result and how people use it.

Don’t let the Purity Ball crowd hear that.

“Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.” – Alan Perlis