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Have you ever been tasked to maintain a badly coded legacy app? Have you ever read some snippet that is so clear you don’t have anything to edit? Those are the opposite points of things. It’s not objective because the computer doesn’t care anyway.

It’s like a well written prose vs a drunk’s rambling. They could describe the same scene, but one is much pleasurable to listen to. Or strolling through a well-tended garden vs walking in a landfill.

So it’s subjective, but you know instinctively what you prefer to work with.

by altmanaltman3 hours ago|

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Again, all of those are metaphors that describe a feeling and not anything concrete. Like what makes a codebase feel like "strolling through a well-tended garden"--there has to be some objective measures for that, right? Some things like "it's easier to maintain" or "it has really good readability," etc? Why are we not talking specifics of this "taste" instead of using The Karate Kid wax-on wax-off type metaphors?

And that is my central gripe with this piece--it doesn't care about the details and handwaves everything bad as having "bad taste." That is fundamentally lazy imo.

by skydhash2 hours ago|

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As I said, the computer does not care, neither would a robot care about a garden or a garbage dump as long as it can cross it. But we interact with the world through our senses and we categorize things with epithets like pleasant, disagreeable,… And when we can present things to others would generally find enjoyable and pleasing, we are deemed to have good taste.

So the act of presenting and the judgement by others are what qualify the whole “taste” thing. The judgment is not yours to make, and presentation (either voluntarily or not) is all that needed for others to form an opinion.

So your private code that no one else has seen? No one cares. The repo linked to your Show HN post? You will be judged based on that.