taste

n.

1. The quality in a program that tends to be inversely proportional to the number of features, hacks, and kluges programmed into it. Also tasty, tasteful, tastefulness. “This feature comes in N tasty flavors.” Although tasty and flavorful are essentially synonyms, taste and flavor are not. Taste refers to sound judgment on the part of the creator; a program or feature can exhibit taste but cannot have taste. On the other hand, a feature can have flavor. Also, flavor has the additional meaning of ‘kind’ or ‘variety’ not shared by taste. The marked sense of flavor is more popular than taste, though both are widely used. See also elegant.

2. Alt. sp. of tayste.