Elegant is one of the more complicated terms in software engineering. Depending on who is using the word, it can mean some combination of: efficiently designed, easily understood (regardless of complexity), surprisingly brilliant, fault tolerant in a clean manner, very insightful on a problem area, etc. Sometimes code is elegant relative to what has been in place, so going from highly complex to slightly complex might be called an elegant solution. Honestly, I've seen elegant used in just about every way imaginable.
While there may be a TON of things alluded to when calling something elegant, generally people mean that it's easy to understand, thoroughly solves the problem, and isn't likely to break. I would imagine that many elegant solutions become legacy code eventually because they don't easily die and don't necessitate placement all on their own.
I'd be interested to hear how other people view/use this word. I haven't given it much thought, but now that I am, it seems to be very important.
> efficiently designed, easily understood (regardless of complexity), surprisingly brilliant, fault tolerant in a clean manner, very insightful on a problem area, etc.
I think your description of elegant is good. One more aspect of elegant is: doing all those things you list here in a manner idiomatic to the language and paradigm you're working in. So for example, regardless of how efficient or easily understood your solution is, if you're using loops and mutation in a functional language, it would rarely be considered "elegant" by experienced people working in that paradigm (that's not to say that loops and mutation aren't very occasionally a good idea in functional languages, but they'd still not be considered elegant).
While there may be a TON of things alluded to when calling something elegant, generally people mean that it's easy to understand, thoroughly solves the problem, and isn't likely to break. I would imagine that many elegant solutions become legacy code eventually because they don't easily die and don't necessitate placement all on their own.
I'd be interested to hear how other people view/use this word. I haven't given it much thought, but now that I am, it seems to be very important.