Creeping elegance - Wikipedia

It is proposed that this article be deleted because of the following concern:

Fails WP:N. Googling suggests this is not so much a practical concept as a hypothetical one, the inverse of legacy code bloat. Available sources often devolve into confusion about whether this is synonymous with feature creep, as the article itself appears to do. To boot it is written in unusually unencyclopedic language. Google News returns nothing relevant, nor does the News Archive. Google Books returns a few hits, but nothing that exactly matches the concept as here described. I think the lack of activity on such a luridly-written page over the past 20 years kind of speaks for itself. (proposed by Ccoraf)

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{{subst:proposed deletion notify|Creeping elegance|concern=Fails [[WP:N]]. Googling suggests this is not so much a practical concept as a hypothetical one, the inverse of legacy code bloat. Available sources often devolve into confusion about whether this is synonymous with [[feature creep]], as the article itself appears to do. To boot it is written in unusually unencyclopedic language. Google News returns nothing relevant, nor does the News Archive. Google Books returns a few hits, but nothing that exactly matches the concept as here described. I think the lack of activity on such a luridly-written page over the past 20 years kind of speaks for itself.}} ~~~~

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Find sources: "Creeping elegance" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (February 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

In software development, creeping elegance, related to creeping featurism and second-system effect, is the tendency of programmers to disproportionately emphasize elegance in software at the expense of other requirements such as functionality, shipping schedule, and usability.

Creeping elegance is also forced by customers and sales personnel in the last stages of software development. Often one comes up with "just another feature" before the delivery date,^[1]^: 81 and the software developer is left with the choice of prioritizing between delivery on time according to schedule or to fully satisfy customers and/or the sales department.

Complexity and readability are the main reasons why programmers tend to favor elegance over functionality all else being equal, simply to mitigate the more marginal cognitive burden of the task, which is very high compared to many other fields even in computer science.

It is definitely an area in which management and marketing conflict a lot with programmers, but most programmers will behave very petulantly when asked to deal with very old, poorly documented, or otherwise poor code, and often this will lead to easter eggs, intentional exploit vulnerabilities, and staff turnover.