This is of course subject to personal preference, but the things that come to my mind first are along the lines of:

I certainly am a fan of readable code, but there should also be as few comments as possible, just enough to fill in the odd question that might arise in a reader's head as they are following the flow. Extra comments are fine if one is writing code to teach, but in practice I don't think it helps to write code on the assumption that later readers will be newbies. To be clear about this, I consider comments different from documentation which should be at the start of a routine, explaining the input, output, and general algorithm. I may be pushing it here, but I sometimes feel like every comment in-line is a blight, moving the work further from elegant with each line.

--
I'd like to be able to assign to an luser


In reply to Re: IYO, what is elegant code? by Albannach
in thread IYO, what is elegant code? by stonecolddevin

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.