Function before form or form before function?

What do you believe in? As an incomplete basis for a good product - would you prefer a mess of cod开发者_JAVA技巧e that is horrible to look at but works perfectly for what its supposed to do, or a beautiful set of well organized classes (or something else if OO doesn't float your boat) but have buggy functionality that still needs a lot of work?

If you were just handed a project to improve and work towards completion, which would you prefer? And what do you put the emphasis on when starting a new project?

Well written code will be easier to debug. If the code is too messy, even if it has "no bugs" (unlikely) it will not be maintainable.

I prefer both. However, if I was going to be handed a project I would go with buggy but beautiful everytime.

If we're talking about abstractions, I'd prefer to have just a small base set of working features. While it might be nice to have a pre-built, working library on top of this, the user can always create greater functionality from that working base.

Maybe they don't look nice, but again, a user can always just create a wrapper to make things look nice. I vote function.

Real artists ship - so something, that is both beautiful and gets the job done. But when in doubt, err on the "gets the job done" side, even if it isn't perfection.