He describes elegance as: "the ability of a programmer to easily understand the program's flow and state coordination, being completely familiar with the tools used but completely unfamiliar with the codebase."
You're right that it is not something easily measurable.
The product of code golf is measurable. But, code golf is not usually what you want in production code. Performance is not about characters/lines of code and neither is clarity or maintainability, necessarily.
I don't think there is anything wrong with this sort of requirement. He stated there are no winners. Elegance could really be decided by the community.
Just try to write concise but clear code that would be easily understood by most who are well-experienced in the language/framework.
You're right that it is not something easily measurable.
The product of code golf is measurable. But, code golf is not usually what you want in production code. Performance is not about characters/lines of code and neither is clarity or maintainability, necessarily.
I don't think there is anything wrong with this sort of requirement. He stated there are no winners. Elegance could really be decided by the community.
Just try to write concise but clear code that would be easily understood by most who are well-experienced in the language/framework.