"Which is the better painting, Van Gogh's Starry Night or Seurat's La Grande Jatee?" is a deeply subjective question.

"Which is the better painting, Van Gogh's Starry Night or a kindergartener's watercolor of their family?", on the other hand, appears to have a correct answer.

There are multiple competing definitions of "simple" with respect to code and multiple kinds of simplicity that often have to be traded off against one another, and reasonable programmers can and do disagree about which compromises to make and where. Code quality (including, but not limited to legibility) is in many regards a subjective endeavor.

That doesn't mean, though, that all decisions are equally justifiable. Trust your sense of aesthetics. It's usually trying to tell you something important, even if you don't know how to put it into words yet. With subjective endeavors there is no perfect, but there is usually better. Chase that.

In your first example, both are exceptional, so really "which is better" is irrelevant.

In the second, the difference is so big that it's obvious for anyone which is better, but that still doesn't make it useful for getting better at painting. "Paint more like a Van Gogh and less like a kindergarten kid" is not useful advice.

People do have art critics and manuals that attempt to write down exactly what made Van Gogh paintings great. Those writings are useful, and many artists do indeed study them.

Maybe I read too much into your original comment, but it reminded me of a pitfall that I see too many engineering types fall into, namely that because something can't be formalized then it must be arbitrary, unimportant, or both. In particular, this seems like a counterproductive way to frame the issue:

> If I have no objective criteria, then it must be subjective, and then all that "simple" means is that "this is easiest for me right now"

Here's a few other (actionble) things that "simple" can mean.

    * seems to reliably be easiest for me every time I look at it
    * was judged to be better by the three or four people I could get to give me an opinion
    * follows a heuristic that a bunch of smart people all seem to agree generally makes things better
    * mirrors whatever we did on this project the last time we were in this situation

Even if all it means is "easiest for me right now", that's still probably going to get better results than "the first thing that popped into my head that might work".

There is no objective definition of simple. On behalf of the maintenance programmers of the world, please don't take that to mean it's not worth trying anyway.

> There is no objective definition of simple.

Oh, I agree with that. What I meant was that "this doesn't mean there can't be objective criteria about what is simple and what is not; or that it's futile to attempt objective definitions of 'this is simple/this is not' ".

"Easiest for me right now", in my experience, only leads to simplicity in trivial cases. Simplicity requires intense thought & explorations, it's never easy (except, again, in trivial circumstances).

There's a term for the objective measures of quality: kwalitee. It's kinda like quality, but quality is hard to define let alone measure, so kwalitee is good enough for some purposes. https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Cheesecake https://qa.perl.org/phalanx/kwalitee.html