Not Just a Matter of Style: Does Aesthetics Have a Place in Software Engineering Curriculum?

Aesthetic designations of code matter in how software engineers work together. Our empirical fieldwork finds that aesthetic designations are frequently used to informally assess code in the industry (i.e., code being called “beautiful,” “elegant,” “ugly,” “messy,” etc.). In this position paper, we build on our empirical fieldwork in the industry to describe the preliminary findings of a survey on students’ aesthetic attitudes toward code. To understand how aesthetics is covered in software engineering courses, we surveyed 52 B.S. and 25 M.S. software engineering students about their attitudes on how “beauty” in code manifests. Our early findings suggest that 75% of undergraduate and 86% of graduate students believe that one should always strive to write “beautiful” code. Further, 98% of graduate and 85% of undergraduate students are aware that aesthetics is an aspect of software quality. While it may be inefficient to formalize aesthetic considerations in pedagogy, we argue that aesthetic aspects of code should be made explicit in teaching code-writing skills.