Torvalds' quote about good programmers

Quite a nice summary, courtesy of http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/163195/31774

Something like 10 years ago I was lucky enough that a guy told me and explained me this stuff, that I was starting to understand myself btw, and programming suddenly changed for me. If you get the data structures right, the first effect is that the code becomes much simpler to write. It's not hard that you drop 50% of the whole code needed just because you created better data structures (here better means: more suitable to describe and operate on the problem). Or something that looked super-hard to do suddenly starts to be trivial because the representation is the right one.

Or to put it another way - algorithms are the plot, representation are your characters, and code is your language. One or two of three aren't enough.

Code is very good investment, it must be as short and simple as possible, but not too much. There must be a balance, compromise between volume, verbosity and meaning, as in a good poetry. The heuristic here is 'less is more'.

This must be not confused with languages. Bad, unreadable code could be written in any language, but some over-hyped languages are bloated and messy from the birth.