What percentage of code you have worked with in your career is that beautiful code that you love to work with?
To make it more fair, code you wrote yourself doesn't count, because you aren't an objective observer -- and more importantly, have a different relationship to it making it easier to work with since you wrote it, and often to your own preferences.
I think I agree with you, it's just that... the actual way software is written doesn't seem to allow for much clean and maintainable and easily extensible code to be written, so I'm not sure how much it matters practically.
A healthy percentage of the open source projects companies I’ve worked for have used and opened PRs against I would call pretty good looking. Ruby on Rails was always nice to read through and well documented. I also find a lot of datasheets and RFCs to be highly elegant and beautiful, if not a bit dense and verbose. It just depends sometimes, what makes something like art beautiful.
I disagree strongly that “the actual way software is written …”, though it does feel like trying to write clean code is an uphill battle sometimes.
Back to the shop analogy. Cleaning up oil spots and maintaining well polished tools requires time and care.
To make it more fair, code you wrote yourself doesn't count, because you aren't an objective observer -- and more importantly, have a different relationship to it making it easier to work with since you wrote it, and often to your own preferences.
I think I agree with you, it's just that... the actual way software is written doesn't seem to allow for much clean and maintainable and easily extensible code to be written, so I'm not sure how much it matters practically.