i like this quote from nat friedman from Planet GNOME...

"users should like us for our software, not for our working habbits..."

somewhat related to the issue of code quality... code quality fades into the background once the binary is shipped... users will never know how elegantly the code was designed or how much sleepless nights it has incurred on us codaholics... at the end of the day, all that matters is how good the user experience is...

but code quality can undeniably lead to a better binary product... so its not an excuse to at least learn the basics of producing high quality code... there must always be a balance of things... i have read somewhere that linus torvalds strives to have code that can be easily understood by many, while alan cox cares more about stability or code that reliably works (at the expense of code quality)...