Comment by sbarre

Again it depends what you mean by "high quality code".

Do you mean how well it was written, or do you mean how well it performs? Or do both matter? Equally, or one more/less than the other?

It probably depends on whether you're the developer taking over the codebase, or the customer running the code in production..

Take video games.. A lot of it is messy spaghetti C++ code, not modular or well structured, full of hacks and manual optimizations, to give the best possible performance on available hardware.

It might be impossible to parse or maintain, but it does the job about as well as possible, which is really all that matters to the end user. I would call that high quality code.

So again, subjective...