Some interesting parts were about the metaphors that people use to make sense of 'pretty' code (is code like prose? like poetry? like maths? like architecture? are any of those craft activities?), and about the role of tools (from IDEs to languages) in affecting what we consider to be nice or not.
I've been chipping away at something similar. I mostly keep writing "what is art," "who are artists," and "what is programming" "what is a programmer?" So I may reach out. It's not formal, but is inspired from my academic career and interests.
> The first step in our study of aesthetic standards in source code will identify the aesthetic ideals ascribed by programmers to the source code they write and read; that is, the syntactic qualifiers and semantic fields that they refer to when discussing program texts. To that end, we first start by clarifying whom we refer to by the term programmers , revealing a multiplicity of practices and purposes, from massively-distributed codebases to ad hoc , one-line solutions, cryptic puzzles and printed code.
Even this paragraph is similar how I've written in terms of word choice. :)
Nice bibiliography too. Happy to see Tractatus there.