Preferably an elegant snippet rather than an entire (well engineered) codebase.
Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?
1–10 of 394 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?
#2https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging
This python code was part of the imaging, analysis, and simulation software for radio interferometry that led to the historical first 'image' of a black hole.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?
#3https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging This python code was part of the imaging, analysis, and simulation software for radio interferometry that led to the historical first 'image' of a black hole.
What about the code did you find so striking? Any part in particular you recommend checking out?
Re: Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?
#4At first, incomprehensible. Given time, the internal consistency shines through. Worth spending a few hours reading and contemplating:
Re: Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?
#5Any of Norvig's notebooks, http://www.norvig.com/ipython/README.html, especially his Concrete Introduction to Probability https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/Probabil....
Re: Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?
#6For me, the answer is - The code that never existed.
Not to sound cheeky but eliminating code, is a beautiful thing. Less code is easier to maintain, understand, and faster to run. So the less code you can achieve, the better overall the software will be.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?
#7John Carmack's Fast Inverse Square Root: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root#Overv.... The first time I really and truly felt that people approach problems differently from how I, by default, go about them.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?
#8As a student in 2001, Tim Sweeney's template recursive inheritance was next level for me:https://www.flipcode.com/archives/Vector_Math_Quaternions.sh...
About 10 years later you would find this stuff everywhere in boost but for the time this was spectacularly elegant for C++
Re: Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?
#9It's a bit of a tricky question because you can have a beautiful snippet entangled in a mess of a codebase.
I think a much better question would be most beautifully structured codebase.
Code, as a snippet, or line, is constantly struggling between poetic conciseness and verbose clarity... To which I will always pick clarity (for "the next guy"), hence not necessarily elegant.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?
#10 10 print "Hello World";
20 goto 10;
run