I wholeheartedly agree with this, but try explaining it to most developers. What is it about geeks, specifically geeks in the cliched Asperger’s-ish mode, that makes them unable to see the logic in aesthetic or formal values? There’s such a strong bias against these virtues as somehow superficial or false amongst this group, like aesthetic beauty creates a false human happiness and having a faster computer creates a real one. I find this problem especially frustrating since the best of these kinds of geeks describe their pursuit of engineering perfection itself in terms of aesthetic beauty and formal correctness; they are just too narrowly focused to seek or appreciate the same values in other domains, even domains that have a much more immediate and broad impact on enormous numbers of people.