Reading code is good right? What pieces of code have people here read through recently? Was it inspirational/educational/helpful? Any code you would recommend to others?
Ask HN: What code have you read recently?
1–10 of 40 posts
Re: Ask HN: What code have you read recently?
#2I had a look at the Haskell Prelude code: http://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/standard-prelude.html
Lots of good code in there, especially in regard of simplicity and beauty. If you're diving into functional programming, be sure to have a look at it, even if you're a beginner like I am.
Re: Ask HN: What code have you read recently?
#3Aside from the spaghetti code that my predecessor wrote, I've been reading a book called "Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship" by Robert C. Martin. The code in the book isn't always interesting for content, but rather for style and craft. He does a great job explaining industry best practices, along with How and Why they are used.
Re: Ask HN: What code have you read recently?
#4I'm currently reading "The Ruby Programming Language" (coming from a C/C++/PHP background). I'm looking forward to write my next web app using RoR.
Re: Ask HN: What code have you read recently?
#5I generally have a quick read through the code of plugins on Github before I used them.
Re: Ask HN: What code have you read recently?
#6This book deals with effective code reading:
"Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective"
http://www.spinellis.gr/codereading/
Re: Ask HN: What code have you read recently?
#7I have been reading the R base library code, mainly to understand the graphics functions. I'm amazed how simple and ordinary it looks. I have never worked on a big software project and it's exciting for me to see how something powerful is built from small chunks here and there.
Last year I spent some time reading the arc source code. It was a lot of fun. I didn't know any Lisp, so the recursions and macros were hard for me to get my head around, but it was amazing to realise that this site is built on some small core concepts which can be grokked if you spare the time.
I loved Douglas Crockford's book Javascript: The Good Parts. Again, I couldn't understand all of it but it gave me a good feel for well-written Javascript code.
Re: Ask HN: What code have you read recently?
#8http://github.com/kohana
I learnt a few things from the Kohana source. How not to use regular expressions for validating certain strings (URLs) for one. filter_var can do this and a lot faster too.
I suggest anyone who's interested in PHP to take a look.
Re: Ask HN: What code have you read recently?
#9Tornado web server. It's extremely good code solving hard problems with a great attention to detail and in a minimal way. Highly recommended.
Re: Ask HN: What code have you read recently?
#10I've been reading some BSD userland source (awk, sed, trek, and OpenBSD's netcat) parts of Lua and OCaml's VMs, Redis, and Joy. Awk and Lua's source are particularly good, IMHO.
The code that had the biggest impact on me lately was the original J interpreter, though: http://nsl.com/papers/origins.htm . It looks like some sort of crazy brainfuck-ish thing, but it's not a joke. I highly recommend printing it out and trying to get in Arthur Whitney's head. (But if you run it, it will probably just segfault. It's rather cavalier with nonportable function pointer casting. It's prototype code from 20 years ago. If you want a working version, look at J (http://jsoftware.com) or Q (http://kx.com).)