I judge books by their covers. Heck, I judge a lot of books by their spines. Publishers put a lot of work into designing book covers so that you can, in fact, get a pretty good idea of their content, tone and style based on their cover.
The actual maxim should be "Judging a book by its cover actually has an extremely high success rate and can be safely done in many cases, however it has a finite failure rate especially in terms of determining the quality of a book and so should be avoided in cases where incorrect judgement will cause problems".
PS. Yes, I know those examples were entirely unnecessary, I just wanted to take the opportunity to show off some amusingly terrible book covers.
You shouldn't judge a book by its spine. Those are usually optimized for bookstore clerks to organize the book into the right area, and might show not really be related to the content very much.
As an extreme case, I judge books before I even see their spines. I judge books by their location in the bookstore and don't even walk into the aisle to catch a glimpse of the spine. Maybe somewhere in the "Romance" section of the bookstore there's a book that would really appeal to me, but I'll never see it.
Sometimes I even judge an entire store-ful of books without looking at 'em. I've already judged the entire contents of my local "Anarchist Bookstore" without setting foot inside the place.
There's thousands of bookstores in China that I've never even seen, and I know I won't enjoy the books inside them. Look at me, I'm dismissing billions of books that I have never seen and will never see, simply because I suspect they're probably written in languages I don't understand!
Anyway, if I ever get to the point where I'm judging a book by actually looking at its cover then that book is already getting way more scrutiny from me than most.
actually, old (~ pre-70s) sf cover art is a particularly bad choice of examples - the covers often bore very little relation to the actual contents of the book.
Given that you see a jacket with a buxom woman in a skimpy dress being embraced by a leprechaun with Fabio-pecs, would you assume that this fact has no predictive value with regards to the question "Is this, in fact, a quality work of literature?" No, of course you'd assume it is pulp, which is why people whose business is selling quality works of literature don't package it as pulp.
Most of us are not in the business of selling anonymous writing written by people of no particular expertise which is designed to have a shelf-life of twenty minutes and yet we spend extraordinarily amounts of time producing things in a cover which says exactly that. We should, instead, devote more of our limited resources to creating work in the cover that says "important things you should act upon immediately from the people you trust more than anyone in the world about this topic."
Only if it's true, though. If you try to sell pulp in a package more suitable for serious litterature, you won't reach readers who are interested in pulp and you will upset people who seek serious books.
I think the real problem you're trying to address is the lack of confidence of programmers into their own writings; their bullshit detector is too sensitive when placed too close to the source.
For instance, compare
"The Planet Wizard" http://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Plan...
to
"Taken By You" http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n16/n82162.jpg
The actual maxim should be "Judging a book by its cover actually has an extremely high success rate and can be safely done in many cases, however it has a finite failure rate especially in terms of determining the quality of a book and so should be avoided in cases where incorrect judgement will cause problems".
PS. Yes, I know those examples were entirely unnecessary, I just wanted to take the opportunity to show off some amusingly terrible book covers.