Your argument falls apart completely when you take the long term lifecycle of the code into account. Which is exactly why we keep having these discussions.
And by the time we pay the price everybody cares. Of course, by then it's way too late to start caring about such esoteric programmer obsessions as elegant, simple, clean, and most of all: open to change.
Yes, all people ask is code that is good enough to do whatever it's supposed to do. They just have no fucking clue of what it is that the code is supposed to be able to do besides satisfying their short term needs.
And by the time we pay the price everybody cares. Of course, by then it's way too late to start caring about such esoteric programmer obsessions as elegant, simple, clean, and most of all: open to change.
Yes, all people ask is code that is good enough to do whatever it's supposed to do. They just have no fucking clue of what it is that the code is supposed to be able to do besides satisfying their short term needs.