Code is beautiful text .. 

Early days , when we figured out text ,  written word commanded as much attention as the code in our times. Which meant iterative rigor to precipitate the words into rule based immaculate verses - such that the message stayed in our carbon based  memory. Primary objective of a computer program is to have data persist in silicon memory.

 No wonder good code rhymes like a poem !

Back then, the upfront effort to organize scribing paraphernalia (quills, palm leaves, ink etc.) was a lot ... . And that you could write only one copy at a time was an entry barrier. It mandated the text must be accurate, succinct and comprehensible. One may argue scaling compute, storage and network are barriers that force similar constraints on our code.