Atop all the nice things people said above, I think there's one other trait I can only express this way:

It looks like the language was designed just to solve this problem in exactly this way.

Good melodies also share this trait. Once the public hears it, the public can't remember a time when they didn't know it. Henry Mancini and John Williams and Johann Sebastian Bach. They plucked the notes from mankind's subconscious and we all know them by heart.

Examples of elegant Perl code? As famous as it is, I wouldn't say the Schwartzian Transform quite meets the bar (in my opinion); it's memorable but it looks like it overcomes something obviously missing in Perl syntax itself. The sublime and subliminal grep { not $seen{$_}++ } trick to get unique sets is where I see it.

The problem with thinking up some one-liner examples is that Perl promotes the good stuff into one canonical token and everyone forgets the amazing work that it does behind the scenes. What other language allows such effortless expressions? Think of the dizzying work behind doing a sort, a grep, a m//g?

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[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]

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

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