Evolution may write poor code, but it can accomplish some really cool stuff with it. The human brain, for example. If a programmer had managed to recreate the human brain in code, even if he did it in spaghetti-coded COBOL, people would want to have a look.
Also, evolution isn't always elegant, but it often is. Think of the symmetry and self-similarity found so often in nature.
The very poor code I'm referring to is in the genotype (i.e., the DNA sequence). You can get an elegant phenotype (i.e., the resulting creature) from a very messy genotype.
If you see things that way, then yes, DNA code is not very elegant or parsimonious. There are plenty of sequences that don't do anything (as far as we know).
Also, evolution isn't always elegant, but it often is. Think of the symmetry and self-similarity found so often in nature.