>> A measure being objective doesn't make it good

>That completely misses the point. It’s not about what’s good

The loss of context here makes me wonder if I am talking to an AI. The comment you originally replied to was,

We know what a good batting looks like but we still can’t say what good code is in any reasonably objective way.

You replied with, "Sure we do" and proposed a list of metrics.

Are we tracking? The original comment claimed that we do not know how to objectively measure goodness in code. You are (apparently) claiming to know how to do it. I am claiming it is impossible even in principle.

In this context, I find your response ("It’s not about what’s good", and the claim that "better" is easier fo measure) bizarre and nonsensical. Like an AI, you seem to have lost track of what we are talking about. We are talking about whether we can objectively measure code being good. It is exactly "about what's good".

Of course it is possible to measure things about code, but equating those measures to goodness relies on artificially constrained circumstances -- like a code golf contest or a PO declaring test coverage a metric to maximize. Athletes find themselves in such constrained circumstances all the time because it is a pursuit dominated by competition and games! It is most obvious in sports like sprinting or powerlifting, which are analogous to something like code golf, but even sports like basketball in which "goodness" is harder to define are heavily artificially constrained such that goodness in a player is about maximizing an objective measure - team score. This might be analogous to a programmer who sees his mission in terms of ticket closed per week. By contrast, programmers in general are usually working in a context in which the quality of what they produce is measured by a lot of complex impacts - on users, on business, on other programmers.

Some of what code needs to accomplish - conceptualizing a problem well, communicating clearly - is inherently subjective, having to do with how it is received by another mind. Programmers (myself included) are generally focusing on these sorts of characteristics when talking about code in isolation, partly because we feel the impacts to ourselves most keenly. But I would contend that there is something deeper and less obvious here - that maximizing this subjective goodness profoundly improves the situation in more objective areas. Well architected code, well communicated code, clear code is resistant to defects in a way that mere test coverage can't accomplish. This is not obvious, but it is deep wisdom arising from experience, and is part of what drives programmers to emphasize the ineffable in their understanding of goodness.

In fact, I was originally going to draw a parallel between being a good basketball player, maximizing team score, and a programmer maximizing business revenue. But I stopped myself, because this is an element of the deep wisdom of good code: focusing on ineffable, subjective excellence is profoundly positive for revenue. It's not something you can measure directly so much as it defines the circumstances the business finds itself in. This observation isn't unique to me - here's a pg essay making a similar point: https://paulgraham.com/avg.html Programmers talking about code being good in this sense may only be building sandcastles in the air - but they also may not be. You must possess the wisdom yourself to tell the difference. But there is certainly more to it than than selfish vanity.

But even leaving that aside, because code must meet a broad array of conflicting demands, optimizing among those depends both on the circumstance and the values held by the people in it. Hence, goodness in code will always have a subjective element, and (in the athletic sphere) is most like saying you are "healthy and fit" or "your best self". You can certainly bring measurements to bear, and we are certainly talking about something real, but there is an inescapable subjective dependence on the value judgement of the judge.

This actually touches on a broader philosophical debate: Are value judgements mere meaningless personal preferences, or are they (often imperfect) attempts to articulate something real? In code, and in life, I believe the subjective is pursuing the real, and moreover that anyone who thinks it's worth arguing about intuitively agrees with this assessment. By contrast, the view that only the objective is real, popular as it has been for the last couple of centuries, and attractive as its promises are, has been increasingly producing absurd results.