Chapter 8. Patterns and System Evolution (Maintenance)

Elegance is]… that elusive quality of coolness that every programmer admires and strives for, yet cannot name. Elegant software is simple. Elegant software is clever, yet not obscure. Elegant software solves complex problems through wonderfully inventive mechanisms that are semantically rich enough to be applied to other, perhaps totally unrelated problems. Elegance means finding just the right abstraction. Elegance means using limited resources in novel ways.

—Booch, 96