The benefit of these criteria of elegance in programming is that they establish a clear grounding for the evaluation of approaches to a problem. This set of criteria emerging from programming as a self-referent discipline it works on the level of disciplinary formalization, as a set of metrics that allow for a scale of abstraction. This formalization can also be politically crucial as a rhetorical and intellectual device that allows programmers to stake their ground in contexts where they might be asked to compromise the integrity of their work, and something that allows them to derive satisfaction from work that might otherwise be banal.