alt Hacker NewsI don't think there's an objective assessment of good code. I've been writing code for over 20 years at this point and most times I've seen what people describe as their own good code I disagree with various decisions.
Experience CAN remove pitfalls, though developers even disagree about those sometimes.
Organization, chosen abstractions, naming etc are basically personal thinking and have differed on every team I've ever been on.
When it's been good is when it's been consistent and that's taken a strong personality the team trusted to have authority.
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Good code is subjective, especially once you start wandering into the territory of more esoteric approaches such as functional programming, domain-specific languages, code-generation, etc.
Bad code is one of those things that we can almost all agree on, often even the person writing it.
Alternatively: I don't know how to make a good movie, but I can recognise a really bad one, and you'll almost certainly agree with that opinion. You and I however will almost certainly not agree on what our favourite movie of all time is. The nuances and personal tastes become more important at the last few percentage points approaching 100% "like".
I used to obsess about code, but over time I came to dread coming into a new codebase and finding layers upon layers of pointless mini-architecture. There would be a controller calling into a separate package where the actual implementation is, then that would call into a layer where service calls are, then all that would be abstracted just in case and built into a separate jar, and so on. And there would still be cross-dependencies. I think what happens there is a kind of purity spiral effect and developers have to go through the motions of following the best practices du jour instead of just calling the damn method.