Most engineers are wrong (I obviously am the true arbiter of taste), but that doesn't mean there isn't better and worse code.
"Does it work" glosses over a bunch of things: is it fast, cheap, secure, reliable, easy to understand, easy to modify? And that's just for server software where you've nailed down all the functional requirements. Determining what the functional requirements is it's own question.
And all these other non-happy path requirements are somewhat in tension with each other, so what is ideal in one environment is not necessarily ideal in another.
And in particular, "easy to understand/modify" is truly subjective. Different people have different ideas of what easy to understand means. Even if we get to a world where AI is writing all our code, "easy to understand/modify for the AI" is still an important question. We've probably all seen prototypes that collapse under their own weight of slop by now.
Well actually there is a reasonably objective standard defining software quality criteria on the source code level (ISO 5055). They also define 29 criteria for maintainability: https://www.it-cisq.org/coding-rules/
See, this goes back to the, all software engineers besides me are wrong, because I see this list and do not think it is anywhere close to a sufficient list for good quality software. The thing about all these criteria is that sometimes they are important, sometimes they are not.
This "standard" exists for the sake of code analysis vendors to be able to have some sort of shared taxonomy, but also provide a fig leaf of standardization to their products.
"Does it work" glosses over a bunch of things: is it fast, cheap, secure, reliable, easy to understand, easy to modify? And that's just for server software where you've nailed down all the functional requirements. Determining what the functional requirements is it's own question.
And all these other non-happy path requirements are somewhat in tension with each other, so what is ideal in one environment is not necessarily ideal in another.
And in particular, "easy to understand/modify" is truly subjective. Different people have different ideas of what easy to understand means. Even if we get to a world where AI is writing all our code, "easy to understand/modify for the AI" is still an important question. We've probably all seen prototypes that collapse under their own weight of slop by now.
This "standard" exists for the sake of code analysis vendors to be able to have some sort of shared taxonomy, but also provide a fig leaf of standardization to their products.