Well-written source code is beautiful.
Ugly stuff should be re-written.

*under economic constraints

One persons ideal of beauty is another persons ideal of madness.

@C0D4 we all know how to spot a code that follows an internal logic tho. that's why teams should have naming rules and proper linting

TFW the new guy wants to build an object oriented ORM and replace the existing open source declarative query builder in a functional codebase without understanding the database schema.

I like terms like simple, plain, boring, maybe even dumb if it's dumb in the "right" way.

Beautiful and elegant makes me nervous depending on who it's coming from.

@ltlian: "[P]lain" stuff CAN be good, but jokes are always nice. ;^)

New senior hire wanted to rewrite all our working PHP code and write it in D, because he:
- did not like PHP
- thinks PHP code is ugly
- D and PHP syntax is interchangeable

Same with replacing our MySQL database with MongoDB.

You might think it look ugly, but the others might not. So is it worth a rewrite?

There is a direct correlation between the modern fad of making things look pretty and the absolutely craptastic performance of most modern software.

Write code for the computer, not for some imagined beauty contest with other developers.

Too many people try to get to the "beautiful" solution in one go. Don't. Write the dumbest possible thing you can imagine so you get a better understanding of the actual problem your trying to solve. Then iterate and compress. You'll end up with simple performant solutions and an actual understanding of the problem you solved rather than learning how to use package manager XYZ and abiding by code standard QWERTY because stack overflow told you to.

A lot of "beautiful" code is ruining end user's days by gobbling up RAM, draining battery, and outright crashing or freezing their devices, but hey it's worth it because your buddy programmer thought the code looked nice, eh?

@mcalis: Beauty and efficiency are GENERALLY not mutually exclusive. But dummies can ruin anything.