In Italian we have a saying that roughly translates as “To know an artist, study his art”.

One of the things that annoys me most (and I'm not a professional programmer, and I'm definitely not ‘hip’ as I'm out of the software industry and about as far from the geographical epicentre of the software industry as can be), is the ever-present Hacker News (and elsewhere) commentary to the effect that “nice, but I wouldn't have used $LANG to build this project”, totally ignoring the fact that the developer in question actually got his act together and started working (for free, for everybody) with the tools he knows and prefers for the task.

I have usually held this saying in the context of code reviews, and in that context I think it's correct, in a work context you should accept criticism and work to improve what you have done.

Open Source is another matter, but in general, just because you did something doesn't make it useful, and above all most software is about making something useful.

Emphatically disagree. We're not creating art, we're creating solutions. Nor are we creating those solutions in a vacuum, we're actually satisfying several constraints: delivery dates, features, cost of maintenance, cost of enhancements, the number of people we have available for each of those activities, and so forth. It's plain to see there's no such thing as "perfect code" except in the most trivial of circumstances. Understanding these constraints and how they impact your architecture, design and actual code is all part of becoming a master programmer.