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Ask HN: Beautiful Code

2 pointsby beandersover 4 years ago
Architects, for example, can name their favorite structures and likely discuss them at length. Can software engineers do the same?<p>Provide examples your favorite pieces of code throughout history, any language.<p>Code can be aesthetic in many ways, I don’t intend to limit responses to any particular metric. Whatever floats your boat. Bonus points for explaining what you like about it.

4 comments

smt88over 4 years ago
I once wrote a web service that I deployed and then never had to maintain. I still have not discovered any bugs in it, and it has not needed any new features. It&#x27;s still running now and has thousands of users a day.<p>That code is beautiful because I never have to look at it or tinker with it.<p>(For those wondering about security, it is deployed in containers that are destroyed and rebuilt from patched images on a daily basis. It does not use any web-hosted libraries.)
Turing_Machineover 4 years ago
The original John McCarthy &quot;Maxwell&#x27;s Equations of Software&quot; in Lisp.<p>Pretty much any code or pseudocode written by Donald Knuth.
dalyover 4 years ago
Lisp in Small Pieces<p>Physically Based Rendering<p>Both books are outstanding examples of readable literate programs.
pestatijeover 4 years ago
Hello world! is beautiful. And yeah, any language.