Richard O’Keefe, The Craft of Prolog (MIT Press)Elegance is not optional.
There is no tension between writing a beautiful program and writing an efficient program. If your code is ugly, the chances are that you either don’t understand your problem or you don’t understand your programming language, and in neither case does your code stand much chance of being efficient. In order to ensure that your program is efficient, you need to know what it is doing, and if your code is ugly, you will find it hard to analyse.