Flutterby™! : Elegant code

Your code may be elegant, but mine f***ing works.

I think much of my recent disagreement with Perl comes from people trying to build "elegant" solutions in it. We end up with side effects and overloaded behaviors and code that has some sort of intellectual elegance to it, but is just a freakin' nightmare to read and maintain.

C++ has some of that, but it's far less celebrated in the culture. Going back to C++ and being able to easily see what and how is causing the failure (and, you understand, I'm saying this about C++) is opening my eyes to just how bad it has gotten.