I recently came across this term in a discussion on facebook and thought it sounded nice. I've always been an iterative sort of person, both in the computer software design field and in 'real life'. Get something simple working, then add and test each feature you are needing from that working base. Some people call that agile but I just call it sensible (hey I started with mainframes so I've seen it all!).

Anyway, this " creeping elegance" term sounded fine. Until I read the articles on it. Not only the brief line on Wikipedia but also in other places and even Websters . So maybe what sounded wonderful to me is rather misunderstood by the rest of the world.

Time to reclaim the phrase, maybe?