Ask HN: The most fun and beautiful code you know of?

What is the beautiful, interesting, suspenseful, fun code that you would rather curl up to read with a cup of coffee than most any other writing?

What is your "nightstand" code?

The art of computer programming.

Not because it's direct computer code, but because when I'm reading it past code i've written starts swirling in my head. Sort of one of those "ahhh fantastic" moments.

Very few people will get this reference, but when I had access I used to read the genweb3 code. It's like a whodunnit because there are no comments. :)

Funny seeing this, because I was at my local Borders earlier and decided to give that Beautiful Code book a shot. I've seen it on the shelf for quite a while, but those books don't tend to turn my crank, so to speak, so I had never before really considered it.

I only read the first and the third essay, but I must say, wow!

The third essay, for instance, takes a simple 12 line implementation of quicksort in C (which is already quite beautiful), and through a series of well explained transformations, arrives at a four line proof (as in, it's C code that is equivalent to the recurrence relation, and eventually the summation, we all solved in our CS classes) of the average case complexity (~1.4nlgn comparisons) of the quicksort he started with.

That is what I would consider "nightstand" code, or at least a nightstand essay about code. It was actually entertaining, to the point that you don't realize you are solving a recurrence relation in C form until the end, when the parallel becomes obvious.

I only had a chance to skim the other topics, but I'm actually considering buying it, because it really was a blast to read.

Shakespeare. It exists. Seriously. It's as beautiful as Shakespeare, but not very fun, sadly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_(programming_langua...